Keyboard-only column block selection in GVim Win32, or why does Ctrl-Q not emulate Ctrl-V when mswin.vim is included?

Question

I want to be able to select columnar blocks using only the keyboard when I use GVim on Windows, but I do not seem to be able to do so when using gvim (7.2) on Windows XP. Edit: For convenience, it is preferable to make the selection with arrow keys as is commonly done in other versions of vi/vim.

In a terminal, when using vim, to define a block, one may select columnar blocks by pressing Ctrl-V and by conveniently moving the cursor with the arrow keys.

When using GVim on mswin, Ctrl-V is mapped to a paste operation. Every reference found on this topic mentions that on mswin, Ctrl-Q is set to act the same way that Ctrl-V works on other platforms, but this does not work for me.

After research indicated that the Ctrl-Q behavior is implemented through the inclusion of mswin.vim, it seemed that perhaps mswin.vim was not being loaded by GVim. mswin.vim is apparently loaded via _vimrc. It seemed that perhaps mswin.vim was not loading, so perhaps _vimrc was not setup correctly, but...

C:\Program Files\Vim\_vimrc exists contains:

source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
behave mswin

C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72\mswin.vim exists and contains:

" Use CTRL-Q to do what CTRL-V used to do
noremap <C-Q>       <C-V>

C:\Program Files\Vim\_vimrc should load since Edit | Settings Window in the GVim graphical menu loads this file for editing, and it is clear that C:\Program Files\Vim\vim72\mswin.vim is loading because one can insert a syntax error in that file and GVim will complain about it when it starts up (it was backed it up for testing and restored to prevent accidental corruption).

When Ctrl-Q is pressed, the cursor changes in the same way that it changes when you block select text using the mouse, but any cursor movement at this point causes the cursor to change back to a normal cursor. It does not matter whether one continues to hold Ctrl, Ctrl-Q, or not.

Edit: Ctrl-Q enters block selection mode as indicated by the cursor change since other cursor movement commands extend the block, however, the original intent of this question was to learn how to use the arrow keys (in the same manner that they are able to be used in other implementations of the editor) though this was not explicitly stated in the original, unanswered revisions of the question.

It is possible to visually select columnar blocks by pressing Alt while holding down the left-mouse button, but Alt during arrow key motion after pressing Ctrl-Q also does not work.

Research also seemed to indicate that pressing v in command-mode would enter visual-mode, and that perhaps this was relevant, but using this does not seem to help the situation.

C:\Program Files\Vim\vimfiles does not contain anything except an empty directory structure. C:\Documents and Settings\username does not contain vim configuration files, nor does C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents. Other C:\Documents and Settings\username locations, where application-specific or local settings are commonly stored, also appear not to have vim settings. The same is true for %HOMEDRIVE% and for the environment variables.

Answer 1

One way to visually select column blocks in GVim on Win32 using only the keyboard is to press Ctrl-Q, release it, then press and hold down the Shift key while using the arrow keys to select the column block.

Why Ctrl-Q columnar selection behaves this way is not known, but it does not really matter since the goal was to select column blocks using only the keyboard. In Vim, Shift is not used when using Ctrl-V to select blocks.

:help mswin does not mention this nuance of the CTRL-V alternative.

Answer 2

The best thing to do is to remove these lines from your vimrc. They are totally unecessary and change too many basic Vim features.