#439 toggle select

[Mike Maxwell]

I would like a command that puts jEdit into or out of selection mode--a sort of "toggle select." What I have in mind is that such a command would change the arrow, page up/down, and home/end keys to select (or not) text. In effect, if selecting were toggled on, these keys would act like their shifted versions. I could then assign a key to toggle the selecting mode.

The ancient Qedit editor had this sort of toggle--it was called "drop anchor." I think the Brief editor had it too.

[Zoltan Kocsi]

There is a $500 bounty on the implementation of this feature. For details see the user mailing list, subject 'Bounty', date 2012-Nov-14.

[Edward Diener]

I would also like to see this. The Codewright editor also had this feature of toggling selection mode.

[Marc Häfner]

Attached is a macro that implements the feature (at least as a proof of concept). I'm not entirely sure if this hits the sweet spot since I never came across any of the mentioned editors, so feedback from (potential) users might be useful.

Installation: Drop the file in ~/.jedit/macros and assign shortcut. Configuration can be changed in the file.

This could (should?) also be reimplemented as a plugin which should allow for a statusbar widget. (And yeah, implementing EditBus and buffer listeners in a beanshell macro is somewhat questionable...)