The "First-class syntactic selection" reminds me of my most used shortcut(s) in Jetbrains IDEs: the Expand / Shrink Selection.

  Ctrl + W
  Ctrl + Shift + W

It really changed my perspective on interacting with the 'text' of a file.

VS Code, Zed, etc. have similar operations, but in my experience they expand and shrink too coarsely.

Mine are:

Cmd+Shift+V - Stacked clipboard, you can start typing to search or hit a number to choose what to paste (keeps everything you've copied/cut inside jetbrains for a while)

Cmd+Shift+E - Recent locations, you can start typing to search - shows little buffers of where you've been recently

Cmd+Shift+A - Action tab of the command palette - fuzzy search for any command (really the only shortcut you need, other than maybe Shift+Shift for main command palette shortcut)

--- Through the Action bar...

Local History / Local History of Selection - you can start typing to search quite far back the history of all changes of the current file or selection - you can also right click a folder or the project and do the same. Much finer grained than git.

The general concept of being able to search for something and edit directly in the buffer of the search results.

To me, it feels like Zed and VsCode perform most operations in a general way on the text; they don't seem to (in Python and Rust at least) have an understanding of the code structure in the way JB does. (And based on some digging on Ki the way it does as well?) So, I would bet they are using that text-based model, which would be hit/miss here.

Mathematica is the earliest thing I am aware of with this feature where it was Alt+. to expand selection in their notebook interface starting in the early 90s. But the thing I miss most that I still can't shake the muscle memory of after almost a decade of not using much Mathematica, is that single/double/triple/n-click scaled this way as well. So double-click selected a whole word (as in all editors), triple-click selected all the comma-separated multiple args of a function, 4-click for f(a,r,g,s), and so on.

Also available as `incremental selection` in Neovim via tree-sitter.

I use it constantly in helix too. The vscode one is meh. I think I saw a discussion in github once about switching to tree-sitter, which would improve AST-related actions. I don't think it went anywhere though.

I love AST aware editing. I think it's one reason it's always been so nice to edit lisps. Stuff that is complicated to describe in javascript (and doesn't have LSP support) p much requires a whole AST parser, but in lisp it's just a simple list operation. When I go back typescript after a weekend of clojure, I reeaally miss slurp! and other paredit commands

I agree, top feature. Combined with things like "extract method" makes mundane refactorings super fast.

Yes, Java IDEs have had these since sometime in the 2000s.

Ty! I have been missing out. Adding this to the repertoire.

Cool feature. what's the key for it in visual studio code?

Ah yes.

The shortcut I use the most in Jetbrains IDEs. Also the one I miss the most in VSCode (whatever is present there just doesn't seem to work right).

Also the shortcut that has caused me to close so many browser tabs inadvertently...

This has got to be my favourite feature of IntelliJ, along with the dumb context actions menu