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While I can understand the percentage sign % being chosen to represent the current file, just because you need to choose some character for that, I am curious as to why '<,'> is representative of the current visual selection.

  1. Why not just use a single character to represent the visual selection?

  2. Can these characters be parsed to have a different meaning?

  3. is '< supposed to mean something like,

    The lesser than value of the quoted text ?

  4. Are there any other useful variations of '<,'> that I should know, say for example, '>,'<?

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    Yes, it does mean something: it's a range (see :h :range) going from line '< to line '>. The '<mumble> denotes the mark <mumble> (see :h '). And marks < and > are (surprise!) the first and last lines in a marked region (cf. :h '< and :h '>). – Sato Katsura Jun 22 '16 at 16:05
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    is '< supposed to mean something you had the right question, you could have asked it to the doc :h '< – statox Jun 22 '16 at 16:08
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    @statox Everything is obvious in hindsight. :) – Sato Katsura Jun 22 '16 at 16:13
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    @statox That gives half the answer (that it breaks down into '< and '> as start and end) but the relationship to "marks" (and what exactly marks are) isn't immediately obvious. – IMSoP Jun 22 '16 at 18:07
  • @SatoKatsura You're probably right... @IMSoP it's maybe not immediately obvious but the '< paragraph is in a chapter called 7. Marks. Anyway OP get a good answer that's the important point :-) – statox Jun 23 '16 at 7:37
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This is actually mark notation. Anytime you go into a visual selection the beginning of the selection is marked with the mark <, and the end with the mark >. You can also do ex-commands between two arbitrary marks that you place yourself. i.e. :'a,'bs/foo/bar/. Vim is just borrowing from the system already in place.

As for what '>,'< would mean. Since we now know this is mark notation, we can see that this would give us a backwards range. (I think vim can sometimes operate on backwards ranges, but it's generally not very happy about them.)

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