Hope there can be a "natural selection" feature

When you're in a text editor, it's natural to select text using SHIFT + (CMD/+ALT) + LEFT/RIGHT arrow keys. Hope this feature can be adopted by iTerm, then it will be trivial to copy long commands while editing.

I'm aware that I can set a shortcut to each of these arrow keys, but the problem is that the setting can only be applied to either selection edge, and have some minor BUGs, like: when you select, it selects one more character after the cursor.

I tried to write a tool to implement this feature myself, but I found that iTerm(2.9.20160206) is not reporting the correct intel through accessibility as shown below:

And one more thing, I know that using ALT + click can position the cursor, it works almost perfect in vim or nano (except when there are double width characters(like Chinese)), but it barely working in zsh when editing long commands. The reason is when click, iTerm sends UP/DOWN arrow key events, and these key can't be handled correctly when editing commands. (I always use 'Copy as CURL' in Chrome DevTools, and paste them to iTerm to reproduce a server BUG or something, it is very hard to jump around and edit that long command)

I'm hoping there can be a setting to turn UP/DOWN keys to repetitive LEFT/RIGHT keys when editing command. And using CMD + SHIFT + LEFT will select all command (except for the prompt) from the beginning of line to cursor, pressing CMD + SHIFT + LEFT again will select the entire line including the command prompt.

To identify if the user is editing a command, retrieve the last line of the display buffer, and match it against a new setting called 'Command Prompt Pattern', which is a user defined regular expression.

Hope these features can be implemented, thanks in advance.

Let's unpack this issue:

1. There is a bug where modifying a selection endpoint selects multiple characters.

Fixed in commit 0fc25a4b

2. Selection ranges are reported incorrectly for accessibility.

Fixed in commit 3b560a46

3. iTerm2 sends up/down arrow keys when you option click

Install shell integration so we know when you're at the command prompt and we'll only send left/right.

4. iTerm2 doesn't handle double-width characters correctly on option-click

Fixed in commit d7a195d7

What's left is a feature request to support a new mode of modifying the selection that acts more like the OS, where a left/right navigation could either grow or shrink the selected region. This behavior is pretty complex and I don't understand it, so I think I need to postpone it until 3.1.

Milestone changed to Feature Complete 3.1

@gnachman I'll try to explain a simple way to mimic OS'es selection feature: Of course this only works for single range selection, so if there're multiple selection ranges, clear them first. Remember a POSITION where the other end of selection is, initially it's at the CURSOR's position. When pressing ←, always decrease POSITION (also consider double-width character and line wrap etc.) same goes for →, always increase POSITION. If ALT is pressed, decrease/increase at word boundary, if CMD is pressed, decrease/increase to nearest line boundary, if ↑/↓ is pressed, decrease/increase at line boundary.

Then at any given time, the selection will be min(CURSOR,POSITION) to max(CURSOR,POSITION).

Hope I've described it clearly enough :P

Milestone changed to Feature Complete 3.2

+1