How to make "find" to not select?

[quomat]

I'm aware that this is blasphemous to the Helix community, as its core philosophy is about selection, but I find myself using "f□;d" combo all the time to delete single characters and "f□;i" to insert at a certain character... I thought that after using Helix for a month I would get used to it, but to no avail. I will gladly take some tips!

I tried to bind the f key to the combo [find,unselect] but it doesn't work because unselection happens before the second key of the find command... Is there a way to make it work?

Thank you for an amazing piece of software you all!

[guicanat]

Not that I would recommend it, but you could try something like this in your config.toml:

[keys.normal]
i = ["insert_mode", "collapse_selection"]

[gabydd]

I believe the collapse selection needs to be before insert mode

[quomat]

That could work, but I don't want to ruin Helix even further 😅

[pascalkuthe]

To insert a single character tXa should work. To delete a single char tXa<del> or fXa<backspace> would work altough if you dont want to insert afterwards (but stay in normal instead) then fX;d probably does work better

[kinxyo]

I mapped a custom keybind for this, so I can avoid 'un-selecting' every time I need to delete a character.

[keys.normal]
'\' =  ["collapse_selection", "keep_primary_selection", "delete_selection"]

Just use fX\ now.

This is equivalent to fXx in Vim or fX;d in Helix.