Implement rectangular selections as an extension

[marijnh]

(The thing you get in CM5 when alt-selecting.)

[curran]

Incredible! Yes please.

FWIW I've been using this feature quite a lot via the Vim mode in CM5. Great feature.

This is a very interesting case for implementing presence cursors on top of.

I'm looking at doing an integration of CM5 (and CM6 eventually) with this new ShareDB Presence implementation.

[marijnh]

I'm not sure you are talking about the same type of rectangular selections that I am—at least, I don't see how those could be any use with presence cursors (which I assume are about collaborative cursor positions?).

[curran]

Here's a screenshot of the feature I'm referring to.

The black is the selected area.

Not sure if this is the same type of rectangular selections you have in mind, but yes presence cursors representing remote users is the idea. I'm not sure how to best represent this sort of selection as a remote user's presence. I suppose there could just be the notion of multiple selections. Haven't dug too deeply into the problem yet, but this would be really cool to get working.

[marijnh]

Multiple selections are supported (and are what this would be built on top of), but those selections all belong to the current user, and that user's editing acts on them, so I don't see how they are helpful with remote users. I expect decorations are more useful there.

[marijnh]

I designed the mouse selection interface with this use case in mind, so it should hopefully be implementable on top of that in a way that makes it compose with other mouse selection modifiers (extend current selection, add new selection range)