[mini.operators] Support visual selection exhange via dot-repeat [gx]

[drowning-cat]

[mini.operators] Support visual selection for exhange operator [gx]

Is it possible for the mini.operators exchange [gx] to support visual selection via dot-repeat?

Keys	Description
v, gx, ..., .	Exchange a charwise visual selection with an unselected region [1]
v, gx, ..., v, .	Exchange a charwise visual selection with another visual selection.
V, gx, ..., .	Exchange a linewise visual selection with the current line (same as gxx).
V, gx, ..., V, .	Exchange a linewise visual selection with selected lines.

[1] Optional. Support selection direction for charwise exchange.
Some ideas:

• Simply paste in the same direction the selection was made, similar to motions.
• Implement a keymap (gX) for selecting without direction awareness.
• Use . for pasting forward and , for pasting backward.
  ...

[echasnovski]

'mini.operators' already supports visual selection in a way that is reasonable for custom operators. Pressing gx on already visually selected region uses it for the current exchange step (either first for "remembering" or second for doing exchange).

What it doesn't support from what you are describing is dot-repeating the action which was previously done on visual selection. This is mostly for several reasons:

• Even for built-in operators, dot-repeating an action after the previous was done for visual selection is fairly limited: it repeats the action on the same size region but applied at cursor. For example: vipd on a 3 line paragraph followed by . in 10 line paragraph will not delete whole 10 paragraph lines but only 3 at cursor.
• Making dot-repeat possible even at current level of support for "exchange" as operator (gxiw once, and then . will work for iw at cursor at any "exchange stage") is fairly convoluted. Making it even more complex would probably be not great in the long term.

There was the precedent, though, for 'mini.comment' in efa0eb3 to make gc be dot-repeatable like built-in operators even after initially done for visual selection. That even resulted into less code and complexity. Unfortunately, quick testing showed that this is not as straightforward with 'mini.operators'.

All in all, I don't think adding dot-repeatability for exchange operator after a visual selection is worth it. If anything, suggesting to more often use operators is not a bad idea.

[drowning-cat]

Thank you for your detailed response.

[drowning-cat]

@echasnovski

Here are a few typos ''block, most likely caused by mini.pairs:

• https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim/blob/main/doc/mini-operators.txt#L302
• https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim/blob/main/doc/mini-operators.txt#L323
• https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim/blob/main/doc/mini-operators.txt#L347
• https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim/blob/main/doc/mini-operators.txt#L368
• https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim/blob/main/doc/mini-operators.txt#L384

[echasnovski]

Thanks! Luckily, this is only a single line issue thanks to 'mini.doc' :) I'll fix this tomorrow.