How to Select Columns in Editors Atom Notepad Kate VIM Sublime Textpad etc and IDEs NetBeans IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse Visual Studio etc

Question

How to select columns in Editors and IDEs to columnar delete  insert or replace some characters    Editors    Atom Notepad   Kate VIM Sublime Emacs Textpad Emerald Editor UltraEdit MCEdit jEdit Nedit   IDEs    NetBeans Eclipse Visual Studio IntelliJ IDEA Flash Builder Aptana Studio

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In TextPad   With the mouse  Left-Click   Alt   Drag  Note that if you first use Alt  and then Click-and-drag  it does not work  at least for me   Ctrl Alt instead of Alt also Works   For pure keyboard  no mouse  enable Block Select Mode with Ctrl Q  B  Or use the sequence Alt  C  B  to do it via the Configure menu   Warning 1  if Word Wrap is enabled  then Block Select Mode will not be available  which is somewhat logical   First disable Word Wrap  This was causing me some trouble  and this gave me the answer   Warning 2  if you mean to insert text in every selected row by typing  you have to use Edit  Fill Block  Other editors let you type in directly

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In textpad   Go to left top of the page  hold  shift key  Now use right arrow key to select column  Now click  down arrow  key  And the entire column will be selected

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In Netbeans 7 1 can select columns  Rectangular Selection  with Ctrl   shift   R   There is also a button  in the code editor available   This is how rectangular selections look like

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jEdit   With the keyboard  press Alt-   Opt-  in Mac OS X  to toggle between rectangular and normal selection mode  then use Shift plus arrow keys to extend selection  You can switch back to regular selection mode with another Alt-   Opt-  in Mac OS X   if desired   With the mouse  Either use Alt-   Opt-  in Mac OS X  as above to toggle rectangular selection mode  then drag as usual  or Ctrl-drag  Cmd-drag in Mac OS X   You can switch back to regular selection mode with another Alt-   Opt-  in Mac OS X   if desired   Actually  you can even make a non-rectangular selection the normal way and then hit Alt-   Opt-  in Mac OS X  to convert it into a rectangular one

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In Sublime3  Windows    Some users may get an inverted screen using the Ctrl Alt   in windows  To Solve this go to   Preferences- Key Bindings-User   And add these two lines at the end of the file just before closing brackets      keys     ctrl alt pageup     command    select lines    args     forward   false         keys     ctrl alt pagedown     command    select lines    args     forward   true       Or use your own keys

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This feature is not available in older versions of Netbeans  up to 7 1  and the plugin is not supported anymore   A plugin is now available for NetBeans 6 9

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on Kate  Ctrl   Shift   B also allows you to add more columns by simply clicking anywhere and paste it   I used this when saving text files I copied from Google Translate as a side-by-side view

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Eclipse used to need a column mode plugin to be able to select a rectangular selection   Since Eclipse 3 5  you just need to type Alt Shift A  see its News and Noteworthy section   On OS X it s Option-Command-A     Or activate the  Editor Presentation  action set   Window  gt  Customize Perspective menu  to get a tool bar button for toggling the block selection mode   AmbroseChapel adds in the comments   This is a toggle  Columnar selection is a mode you enter and leave  in other words  Eclipse switches into a mode where all mouse selections have to be columnar and you stay in that mode until you switch back  by using the same command again   It s not like other editors where columnar selections are enabled only while certain keys are down

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In Flash Builder  v 4 5 and up   and Aptana Studio  at least v 2 0 5  there is a toolbar button to toggle block select  It is between the  mark occurrences  and  show whitespace characters  buttons  There is also a Alt   Shift   A shortcut  Not surprisingly  this is basically the same as for Eclipse  but I m including here for completeness

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In vim column visual mode is Ctrl   v  If that is what you meant

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in Notepad     you can select a particular column holding ctrl   alt   shift and then left click mouse button and drag to select

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With Nedit you can do several operations with selected column   CTRL LEFT-MOUSE                                -  Mark Rectangular Text-Area  MIDDLE-MOUSE            pressed in area        -  moving  text area with pushing aside other text   CTRL MIDDLE-MOUSE       pressed in marked area -  moving  text area with overriding aside text and deleting text from original position  CTRL SHIFT MIDDLE-MOUSE pressed in marked area -  copying text area with overriding aside text and keeping  text from original position

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If you re using Nedit under Cygwin-X  or any platform for that matter   hold down the Ctrl key while selecting text with the left mouse     Additionally  you can then drag the selected  box  around in an insert mode using the depressed left-mouse button or in overwrite mode by using Ctrl left-mouse button

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In TextMate with the mouse  start a selection and keep alt pressed while you move the cursor   Without the mouse  first select normally using   and arrows then hit alt and move the cursor

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In Kate toggle  Ctrl   shift   B

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You didn t explicitly state emacs  but since you ve highlighted lots of editors     In emacs  you can use rectangles for this  where a column is a rectangle of width 1   To create a rectangle  mark the top-left and bottom-right of the rectangle  where the bottom-right mark is one to the right of the further right point included in the rectangle  You can then manipulate via   C-x r k Kill the text of the region-rectangle  saving its contents as the  last killed rectangle   kill-rectangle    C-x r d Delete the text of the region-rectangle  delete-rectangle    C-x r y Yank the last killed rectangle with its upper left corner at point  yank-rectangle    C-x r o Insert blank space to fill the space of the region-rectangle  open-rectangle   This pushes the previous contents of the region-rectangle rightward   M-x clear-rectangle Clear the region-rectangle by replacing its contents with spaces   M-x delete-whitespace-rectangle Delete whitespace in each of the lines on the specified rectangle  starting from the left edge column of the rectangle   C-x r t string RET Replace rectangle contents with string on each line   string-rectangle    M-x string-insert-rectangle RET string RET Insert string on each line of the rectangle

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In IntelliJ IDEA  you can switch the selection mode with Alt   Shift   Insert combination  You can also column select by keeping the middle mouse button  i e  the scroll wheel button  pressed and dragging

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In MCEdit toggle Shift F3  ie F13  or F9- Edit - Mark columns   P S  In this case  MCEdit is an editor written for the Midnight Commander

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SublimeText 2  Using the Mouse  Different mouse buttons are used on each platform   OS X  Left Mouse Button   Option OR  Middle Mouse Button Add to selection  Command Subtract from selection  Command Shift   Windows  Right Mouse Button   Shift OR  Middle Mouse Button Add to selection  Ctrl Subtract from selection  Alt   Linux  Right Mouse Button   Shift Add to selection  Ctrl Subtract from selection  Alt   Using the Keyboard  OS X  ctrl   shift    uarr   ctrl   shift    darr   Windows  ctrl   alt    uarr   ctrl   alt    darr   Linux  ctrl   alt    uarr   ctrl   alt    darr   Source  SublimeText2 Documentation

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In Ultra Edit and Crimson  or Emerald  Editor you can enable disable the column mode with Alt   C

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Notepad    Visual Studio  and some others  Alt   drag  vim  Ctrl   v or  bizarrely enough  Quad-click-drag  In windows  Ctrl   Q  since Ctrl   V is the standard for paste

[vim] How to Select Columns in Editors (Atom,Notepad++, Kate, VIM, Sublime, Textpad,etc) and IDEs (NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc)

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