Question

I started to use vim recently, but I miss the character/line selection methods from other text editors. By default vim maps <S-Up>, <S-Down> to jumping one page up/down and I want to remap these to text selection.

Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

Vim doesn’t bend to that easily in my opinion. The terminal one doesn’t even recognize Shift-Up in my case! I thought the v (character-wise selection) or V (line-wise selection) was among the easier concepts to learn about vi/vim.

If this works (can’t test right now), this is something you’ll want:

" activate visual mode in normal mode
nmap <S-Up> V
nmap <S-Down> V
" these are mapped in visual mode
vmap <S-Up> k
vmap <S-Down> j
" 
" etc...
" similarly <S-Left>, <S-Right> for v