What is "Symbol Highlight Transient State"?

Question

Pressing * (spacemacs/enter-ahs-forward) works like visual star in Vim, except for the mini buffer: What is "Symbol Highlight Transient State" in the mini buffer about?
Where is the documentation that explains the minibuffer options?:

                                        [r] change range  [R] reset   [e] iedit
                    [d/D] next/previous definition
[KEY] exits state  [KEY] will not exit

I am using Emacs 25.2.1 with Evil Spacemacs and Ivy on Linux.

Answer 1

I'm not sure there's that much documentation on that (and I've rebound those keys personally), but I believe it's spacemacs' integration of auto-highlight-symbol.el, which is in various files, including spacemacs/layers/+spacemacs/spacemacs-navigation/funcs.el. You can find out a bit by reading those files. The little key summary there probably indicates spacemacs has defined a hydra to implement this, though I'm not actually sure where that's defined.

You can see from those filenames that the integration is provided by layer spacemacs-navigation, for which you'd be able to find docs using SPC h l spacemacs-navigation RET -- but that's just a stub "TODO" file at the time of writing.

Quoting from auto-highlight-symbol.el:

;;  A minor mode for emacs.
;;
;;   * automatic highlighting current symbol like eclipse IDE.
;;   * cycle through highlighted locations.
;;   * can specify the range to highlight.
;;   * can edit the highlighted symbols at a time.

I found that out by opening the spacemacs directory in dired, then searching for the string you mentioned using SPC /, then SPC h d f auto-highlight-symbol RET and clicking on the link to visit that file.

I believe "iedit" is a multi-line editing package, so presumably that will start a multi-line editing session on the current matches? Why not try the keys and see what they do?