When in overwrite mode, some actions still behave as in insert mode (will cause
text to the right of the cursor to move right instead of staying in place and
having part of it overwritten). Furthermore, other actions that are
"complementary" in insert mode are not in overwrite mode.
For example, I think it would make sense that pressing backspace in overwrite
mode would "leave the characters in place" the same way adding text does when
in that mode, so rather than simply deleting characters, they would be replaced
with spaces.
Something similar would apply to cutting and pasting (which I found already
reported in #763 and #716), and deleting selected text.
This behavior would be particularly convenient when editing **tables** that use
space padding for alignment (e.g. in LaTeX or reStructuredText), or for ASCII
art diagrams (which I often (~~ab~~)use for block diagrams and the like), which
are actually the only cases where I've found overwrite mode useful (and quite
convenient, in fact). That way I could cut and paste or delete text without
having to realign everything afterwards. (In particular, being able to replace
a whole segment of text with spaces with a single key press rather than
pressing space many times can save a lot of time in this scenario.)
The behavior of the proposed "smart" overwrite mode would be:
- Typing: overwrites text.
- Pressing tab: overwrites with tab/spaces depending on setting, OR: simply
moves the cursor forward to the next tab stop without overwriting text.
- Backspace: deletes char at left, places space at right (*: except at end of
line); moves cursor left.
- Delete: deletes char at right, places space at left; moves cursor right.
(Not too useful since typing space will already do that, but this behavior
would mirror insert-mode Delete.)
- Select+backspace: replaces selection with spaces (*); leaves cursor left of
selection.
- Select+delete: replaces selection with spaces; leaves cursor *right* of
selection.
- Select+cut: same effect as select+backspace.
- Paste (N characters): overwrites N characters.
- Select+paste: same effect as select+backspace followed by paste (overwrite,
and if selection was longer than paste buffer, add spaces (*)).
- Ctrl+backspace/delete: word deletion with same behavior as
select+backspace/delete.
- Select+typing: equivalent to select+backspace followed by typing (the
current behavior is to delete the selected text AND overwrite the following
text, which might be done by accident when you're too used to doing that in
insert mode).
- _Alternatively, select + typing a character could replace the whole
selection with that character rather than space._
- Drag and drop text: equivalent to cut+paste (TBD - maybe making this
equivalent to the proposed behavior for cut+paste is not a good idea, since it
is a destructive operation, and some may still want to use it e.g. to change
the order of words in a sentence).
(Since this behavior would probably be unique to Geany, or at least I haven't
seen it before, it should be implemented as an option, possibly disabled by
default.)
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