Expand left (starting) edge of selection?

[MikeTheGreat]

Hello!

I've got a question (not a bug report / feature request):
When I do M-w w I select a word. w then selects the next word to the right.

Is it possible to expand the selection to the left? (for example by using a different key-sequence)

(I think the answer is 'no', but wanted to check)

[leoliu]

For word, + and - controls the moving direction. So - moves to the left.

[MikeTheGreat]

(First - thank you very much for the super-fast reply! :) )

That's close to what I"m asking about, but not quite.

Let's say that I've got the cursor in 'quick', in:
The qui|ck brown fox jumped
M-w w will select quick. Pressing + will result in quick brown being selected.
Is there anything I can press to expand the selection to be The quick brown?

[leoliu]

@MikeTheGreat, I see. That is not impossible at the moment. You have to move to The and start over.

[MikeTheGreat]

Hello!
I had some time and was curious about adding this feature. How would you like me to approach that? (I'm asking both in technical terms (make a change, run the tests, get a code review, etc, etc) and in interpersonal terms (what's the best way to approach y'all with an idea like this?)

(On a related note - it looks like there's 3 unexpected test failures in the test.el file for commit 2a6309d - is this expected or am I doing something wrong?)(I'm guessing that I'm doing something wrong :) )

[leoliu]

hi @MikeTheGreat, Sorry for my delay. See #31. I can't find the culprit that is causing the failure so I intend to just drop support for 24.3. I don't know how to configure .travis.yml for that matter though.

[leoliu]

Your change seems unrelated to #31. Moving left edge of word might be a bit tricky to get right.

[MikeTheGreat]

Hi @leoliu!
No worries about the delay. This is all for fun and personal utility, right? :)

My change ( #36 ) is unrelated to #31.

I made the change (which allows me to expand/shrink the left ('backward') edge) to my files and figured that it would be nice to share the change here, in case anyone else wanted to use it.