Question

One of the nicer features in MacVim is that it is possible to use the usual OS commands for copying and pasting text (namely command+C and command+V) in it.

This is especially nice in situations when you’ve worked in another editor just a minute before and your brain isn’t ready yet to advise your fingers on how to type the real thing.

However, there’s one thing my brain needs to do quite a little thinking on: It’s the text selecting mode. In non-vi editors, I’d use Shift+Arrow for this and trying this in MacVim doesn’t work. But on the other hand it does not look to me that Shift+Arrow is being used for anything else either. Is it possible to remap the keys in order to make this possible?

(Ideally, the editor would still be in insertion mode after having selected the text; that would spare some additional key strokes.)

Answer 1

From the manual:

Text editors on Mac OS X lets the user
hold down shift+movement key to extend
the selection. Also, pressing a
printable key whilst selecting
replaces the current selection with
that character. MacVim can emulate
this kind of behaviour (by providing
key bindings and by setting ‘keymodel’
and ‘selectmode’ to non-default
values) although it is not enabled by
default. To make MacVim behave more
like TextEdit and less like Vim, add
the following lines to your “~/.vimrc”
(not .gvimrc) file:

if has("gui_macvim")
    let macvim_hig_shift_movement = 1
endif