Emacs Elements has another interesting video up. This time it’s about some useful selection commands from from Xah Lee. The first of these is a command to select the current line. I use Steve Purcell’s whole-line-or-region for this and it’s by far my most used selection command. Lee’s version is similar but has the advantage that you can reinvoke it to select subsequent lines. It’s hard to overstate how useful a command of this sort can be. It doesn’t seem like it would be but once you start using it, you’ll never want to be without it.
The second command selects a paragraph or block. It’s almost exactly like mark-parapgraph (bound to Meta+h) except that it also selects the line following the block instead of the line preceding it. It works the same as org-mark-element (also bound to Meta+h) when invoked on a block.
The final command, xah-extend-selection, is very much like Magnar Sveen’s expand-region. It starts by selecting the current syntactic unit and expands the selected region with each subsequent invocation.
Whether you use Lee’s versions or one of the alternatives, these are all very useful commands and well worth integrating into your workflow.