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In emacs there is a way via a keybinding to support the start of a region so then when you hit the equivalent of commands like cut or copy it uses the result of set-mark-command to delineate the start of the region. Of the JRuby core committers 3 of 4 of us use Emacs daily and all three of us use set-mark-command. I think this is a common keybinding in the emacs world. Actually set-mark-command pushes each set mark into a kill ring (so you can cycle through set marks -- marks in emacs can also be used for jumping), but NB is not emacs and I personally just use the simple form described above. I am willing to help create a patch for this if someone holds my hand a little. Not having this makes my eyes misty each time I start Netbeans...
This would need adding new set-mark-command action and updating the existing cut/copy actions to look for the mark and use it if there is one. Is the marked position shown in the text somehow?
Some emacs do highlight from last set mark, but most do not from my memory (MacOS Emacs is what I have been using the most lately and it does). I guess its behavior is very similiar to left clicking and dragging a region. Personally, I do not think it matters much one way or the other. Eclipses equivalent of set-mark does not highlight and when I used Eclipse I never missed the lack of highlighting. Now that I think about it, this action could be quite useful for the macro support in Netbeans. set-mark (non-interactive version of set-mark-command) is used extensively in Emacs to create powerful editing features in Emacs Lisp. I suspect a set-mark action in emacs could be combined with lets say a search action to create all sorts of interesting region marking macros.
set-mark-command is, indeed an essential part of the macro system in emacs. It makes a large class of complex, repetitive editing tasks very easy. I just went looking for it in Netbeans, and was disappointed to find that it isn't there yet. As for how it looks, I suggest that it look no different than left-click-drag selection looks. The "mark" would merely be either the beginning or end of the selected region (depending on which direction the cursor moved after the mark was set).
Yeah, I think NetBeans should behave similarly to Emacs with transient-mark-mode enabled; there's really no benefit in making the selection invisible.
Along with this I would like to have exchange mark and dot. I want to use it so that I can grow (fine tune) the selection on either end using the shift-select mechanism.
As a new user of Netbeans but a long-time user of full-featured text editors, this does seem to melike *the* missing piece of the Netbeans experience -- it's virtually impossible to define macros of any sophistication without some kind of mark in text you're editing. Maybe I don't need Netbeans after all.
Every year I start up Netbeans and try this out and go back to the Eclipse, which now has a really good Emacs pluggin.
Hi, I created an emacs keybindgs plugin for NetBeans. It supports set-mark feature. It is available on NetBeans Plugin Portal. see http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/62006/