See :h intro
for more details
Vim has seven BASIC modes:
- Normal mode
- Visual mode
- Select mode
- Insert mode
- Command-line mode
- Cmdline mode
- Ex mode
- Terminal mode
There are six ADDITIONAL modes. These are variants of the BASIC modes:
- Operator-pending mode
- Replace mode
- Virtual Replace mode
- Insert Normal mode
- Insert Visual mode
- Insert Select mode
As you can see, there is no mode called visual-line-mode
that you talked about in your question. There are just three kinds of visual-mode
, none of which are modes themselves:
- Characterwise visual (see `:h characterwise-visual)
- Linewise visual (see `:h linewise-visual)
- Blockwise visual (see `:h blockwise-visual)
Read :h visual
for more details.
If you look through :h text-object
, you will see that the text objects you're talking about, i.e. i{
are not acceptable for linewise-visual
style of visual mode. Because, text-objects are supposed to work with visual-mode and after an operator, see :h text-objects
. That's why Vim intelligently changes the type of visual mode you were in, because it makes sense. But of course, you're in complete control with just one more keystroke.
Suggestion: Use vi{
to visually select the content inside the curly braces and press V
to start visual line mode over the already selected lines. This is the default way.