Inconsistency of commands behavior between "a" and "i"

[glyh]

Reproduction Steps(for different issues)

1. appending a extends the selection while insertion i didn't, I think they both should
2. in multi cursor mode, w expands all cursors to words, while x collapse to one line, I think x should expands all cursors to lines.
3. after copying multi selections, I can only paste one selection, maybe this one is because I don't know the keybinds though...
4. paste p is can not be multiplied by motions, e.g. 4p will not paste 4 times from clipboard.

Environment

• Platform: Linux arch 5.15.11-arch2-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:23:54 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Helix version: helix 0.5.0

helix.log is empty.

[glyh]

For 3, we may pull copy of selections in a new set of registers, e.g. #1 to #0 to store the first 10 selections, closest to the main selection. Or we just dump every selection into one register, (which should have shape assoicate with it, like neovim).

I think both approach are valuable, so they might end up to be different commands?

[Omnikar]

2. Just expanding all the selections to lines is achievable via X. This does not extend to the next line like x does.
3. If you yank multiple cursors, you need to have multiple cursors to paste everything you yanked.
4. This is already fixed in master (Allow paste commands to take a count #1261).

[glyh]

OK, I'll change title specifically to issue 1.

[dead10ck]

How exactly should insert work if it extends the selection? Are you imagining something like this, where [] denotes the selection and | denotes the head:

[|world] → [hello |world]

If so, this would not work as the code is currently architected, as there are only two ends of a selection: the head and the anchor. The head of the selection is where text is inserted, so in order to continuously insert text to the left, the whole selection must move as well.

[glyh]

@dead10ck I've think about your situations. That makes sense, but there are also situations you want it to include the selection.

e.g.
[|world] => [|hello world] ==(via ms)==> ["|hello world"].

For now I'll just close this. Maybe these are not that important.

[dead10ck]

Ah, so you're talking about inserting text to the right of the cursor. I do think that would be possible. So there could be insert to the left and right, and append to the left and right. This would also give the converse: appending to the right would keep the selection instead of extending. I could see that being a useful thing for some people.