Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Vertical Text Selection

You may need to do sometime vertical selection. For example, in example below, I want to select and remove all “SolidX”.


I need to do vertical selection for this. Selecting text vertically not commonly used but an excellent functionality provided by all serious text editors.

This is how to do it (Windows specific): Hold ALT and SHIFT key and select the text vertically and horizontally. It is not important whether you select first vertically or horizontally but you MUST press and hold ALT key before SHIFT key.

You can do this on all modern Code editors, good text editors like Scintilla based SciTE, TextPad etc. Once you know about vertical text selection selection, you will find its use at more places than what you can think about when unaware.

5 comments:

██ █ █ रावत_ही™ ☠ said...

man this is awesome..such a simple thing..and i never thought about it :)....i will put some mac keys combination..most probably..its same just press command button with that.i will confirm it :)

Unknown said...

hei... this is really a simple and very useful tip!
keep going...! :)

2things said...

I've been scouring Google's results trying to find out how to accomplish vertical text selection within Firefox. No luck so far, but do you or anyone reading this have any ideas? Thanks.

Yogee said...

As of now you cannot do that in firefox. But you can copy the text to a text editor supporting vertical selection.
If you want to select a column of TABLE element of HTML then there are some extensions available in firefox

Anonymous said...

Actually, on windows, you only need to hold Alt while selecting.