Why a do selection but i don't?

[eailfly]

I see there's a issue #2673 talk about this, but I'm still confused
From my thought, i and a should behavior just same except different direction, if we say the a extends the selection and useful for multiple selections, isn't that i should be same too? after all, people don't just 'append' selection, they insert before selection sometimes too.

[the-mikedavis]

Currently a cursor must be at either the anchor (beginning) or head (end) of a selection (or both if it's a 1-width selection). If i extended the selection, the cursor would end up within the selection which is not allowed. If a retained the selection but did not extend it, the cursor would be detached from the selection. You could collapse the selection to the head with ; before hitting li to append without extending or retaining the selection. That behavior would be a worse default though in multi-selection editing scenarios.

Consider this contrived example:

[
  {"data": 87},
  {"data": 88},
  {"data": 89}
]

If you wanted to add .0 to the ends of those digits, you could use

%s\d+a.0

then if you wanted to wrap those numbers in double quotes you could use ms" in normal mode (surrounds the selection with double quotes). If the selection was collapsed by a, you'd need to go re-select the digits. And in cases where you want to collapse the selection, you can use ;.

[eailfly]

That make sense, thanks sir

[sibouras]

ah i see how this is useful thanks, but this also can be solved by gv #6695 and keep a more intuitive