kakoune paste block or multiple selections

Assume you have:

aaa
bbb
ccc

111
222
333

…and you want to end up with:

aaa   111
bbb   222
ccc   333

I dunno what you’d call this. Maybe “pasting a block” or “interlacing lines”.

In vim (what I know fairly well), I’d do:

• position cursor on the first 1
• <c-v> for block mode
• j twice to go down two lines
• E or $ to extend selection to end
• d to cut (kill) the selection
• position cursor on end of the aaa line
• <c-v>jj to select a block of the last char of all 3 lines
• A to append
• insert four spaces
• esc to let the block insert finish
• $ to jump to the end of the line
• <c-v>jj to select a block of the last char of all 3 lines
• p to paste the block (knowing the selected chars will be clobbered)

So as I’m still learning kak, I wanted to recreate that in kakoune. This is what I’ve come up with:

• position cursor on the first 1
• ]p to select paragraph
• <a-s> to split on line boundaries
• d to cut (kill) the selections
• position cursor on the start of the aaa line
• C twice to add cursors on the two lines below
• gl to go-to end of line
• p to paste
• k to go up one line
• <a-j> to join lines
• a to append
• insert 2 spaces

Note: if you do not do the <a-s> to split the selection, you’ll end up pasting the whole block (all 3 lines) after each selected line. That’s not what we want.

Or, I can do it without cutting the newlines:

• position cursor on the first 1
• C twice to add cursors on the two lines below
• x to expand selection to the whole lines
• _ to drop newlines
• d to cut (kill) selections
• position cursor on the start of the aaa line
• C twice to add cursors on the two lines below
• gl to go-to end of line
• a to append
• insert 3 spaces
• <c-r>" to paste register
• esc to exit insert mode

I’m a total kak n00b so I’m sure there are better ways, and I even found that _ trick to drop newlines while I was writing this, but I’m just happy I’ve got it working at all.