Why different selection "modes" and where do the behavior differences come from?

[Stebalien]

This is a bit of a composite question: Why different selection modes and why to they seem to behave slightly differently:

Word/line behave as separate selection "modes", switching between them and/or hitting meow-$dir exits the selection. So far we're consistent, and this seems quite useful (e.g., meow-line followed by meow-back-word to select the last word on a line). But I'm wondering if there's a way to keep the current selection?

meow-$dir-expand keeps the selection, but switches to char selection mode. This is quite useful, I just wish I could switch back to word/line selection. E.g.,

• Run meow-line to select the current line, and re-enter line selection mode.
• Run meow-line then meow-back-word to select the whole line, minus the last word.

When in char selection mode, meow-$dir keeps char selection. This one has me pretty confused, actually.

meow-$dir-expand (and even meow-line) moves the edge of the selection, while meow-next/back-word expand the selection by a word. This one also has me a bit confused:

• Even if meow-next/back-word behaved the same way as meow-$dir-expand, I could use meow-reverse to expand in either direction.
• I'd love to be able to:
  • Select an entire symbol.
  • Switch to the front of the symbol.
  • Unselect the first word.

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I'm mostly looking for context and/or use-cases/motivations that I might be missing.

[DogLooksGood]

Hey!

Actually, based on the frequencies of usages, Meow divides movement commands into 3 groups.

1. The most used are char-based movements, so each direction, expand and non-expand all have their own commands.t e.g. meow-left, meow-left-expand.
2. The second group is word/symbol movements, so backward and forward are separated. And there's one more command for selecting the whole thing. e.g. meow-next-word, meow-mark-word.
3. Rest are not frequently used, so for each type, there's only one command. e.g. meow-line.

And the rules are here:
https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/blob/master/EXPLANATION.org#selection

And you don't really need a way to keep current selection. Because to select something, you only need the start position where your cursor is, and the target position where you can describe with Meow's command. e.g. "To the 7th word", "To the 3rd line". For arbitrary selection, just use meow-$dir-expand, then you can use meow-$dir to create arbitrary selection, based on the rule 2&3. Or just use the Emacs built-in commands(M-f, C-f, etc), they are always available.