Why does meow-mark-word not move in the current direction?

[Stebalien]

meow-line marks the current line, and then the next and the next. But meow-mark-word doesn't.

It's not a huge issue, just oddly inconsistent so I was wondering if there was some reason for this behavior.

[nchisholm]

I think this would be potentially useful behavior. Reversed selections could also select words backwards, also analogous to line selection. I think it wouldn't be too hard to define a function +meow-mark-or-expand-word that would call meow-mark-word, meow-forward-word, or meow-backward-word depending on whether the mark is active and the direction of the selection.

Due to some replication of meow-forward-word and meow-backward-word, this might be useful in combination with a function that shrank selections one word at a time, so you could, e.g., select to the end of a sentence and then "subtract" a couple of words from the end. Currently, you can only expand selections.

[DogLooksGood]

To subtract words, you can use builtin movements, e.g. M-f, M-b.

[nchisholm]

Right! Silly I did not think of that. Would there be any way to also couple M-f and M-b to Meow's repeat-count hints?

[DogLooksGood]

No, there isn't a way to do that, because they are just built-in commands. It's better to create the selection directly by describing where you want to go(e.g. end of a symbol, point after a specific character), instead of constructing the path(e.g. line * 3 + word *2, symbol * 3 - word). IMO, the previous way is much easier, and reasonable. Unless you want a very large selection, in this case you can expand with built-in commands.