Question

When in select mode (used mouse to select some text) if I delete a chunk of text with the backspace the postion of the cursor moves backwards a few places which is very annoying. I know I should probably never be using the mouse but….its annoying!

Answer 1

With me, a visual selection done with the mouse, is (obviously) not deleted with backspace, but that’s probably due the fact that I’m not on a Mac (doesn’t a Mac have fewer keys in the delete/backspace department?)

You might get mileage from this type of mapping:

:snoremap <BS> x

It works like a charm with me. If you feel like being adventurous, you might map it to <Del> even when your physical keyboard doesn’t have that key :).

Note that in order to prevent the ‘cut’ text from being yanked in the default register, change the mapping to be "_x instead of plain x

---

_{On my PCs, mouse selection actually starts a Visual Mode selection, due to the fact that I have behave xterm in $MYVIMRC, so I needed to do this:}

:vnoremap <BS> x

If you want to override the select behaviour back to the default, use

:se selectmode=mouse