In fish shell, how to select with the cursor while shift is held?

Question

In all gui text editing, ctrl-arrow moves the cursor by word, and holding shift selects as the cursor moves. Thus ctrl-shift-left selects the previous word. Fish already has the former but I want to implement the latter.

I tried doing something like

bind \[d begin-selection backward-word      # \[d is ctrl-shift-left

But the problem is that it begins the selection on each keypress, instead of selecting additional words.

Additionally, I don't know how to copy the fish selection to the system-wide keyboard.

Answer 1

What you're trying to do isn't possible with any version of fish that exists as I type this. The begin-selection function is meant to be bound to a key that only initiates selection mode. You can't also perform cursor movement in the same binding because, as you noticed, it starts a new selection with each keypress. That function is currently only used in the vi-mode command mode binding of v. After pressing whatever key you have bound to begin-selection you then need to press a different key that performs cursor movement to extend the selection. In theory this could be made to work the way you want. Feel free to open an issue.

To copy/paste implement you're preferred bindings. These are the default for emacs-mode and vi-mode key bindings:

bind \cx fish_clipboard_copy
bind \cv fish_clipboard_paste

Answer 2

Kurtis has explained well how fish doesn't support this well today. There is an open bug about adding this feature.

You may also be interested in daleeidd/natural-selection, which manages to implement a good amount of shift-select with what's currently available in fish. You may be able to tweak this to support what you want.