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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a text editor that let you select text blocks by drawing a box. (ie, you could draw the box selection style and select the last 5 characters of each line)

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Many OS X text fields have built-in support this -- hold option and drag for rectangular selection. (And as someone else already noted, emacs of course can do this, albeit with a somewhat different UI mechanism -- see M-x apropos rectangle.)

Are you talking about "column selection mode"? It exists in several editors, SlickEdit for example, and lets you select "boxes" (or columns) of characters.

My favorite editor nowadays is Sublime Text, which takes this concept much, much further. It allows having several cursors active at once, each one behaving like a real cursor, so you can do things like ctrl+right to move all the cursors to the next word, no matter the length of each specific word. Kinda like real-time macros, only much better.

You can do this in visual studio if you hold down the alt key and do your selection.

To add to the list, Notepad++ (hold down alt and click+drag, I believe) does this, as does Eclipse (although it's annoying to enable in Eclipse (shift+alt+a to toggle it on, then block select, then toggle it off). It also only seems to work on some file types (e.g. .java, but not .xml) in Eclipse.

Emacs can do this!

Specifically, you set the mark at one corner (C-Space) and move the mark to the other corner. Then you can do rectangle editing with commands like kill (C-x r k), yank (C-x r y) or something to insert a string (C-x r t). These are hugely useful when moving blocks of Python code around, for fiddling with the indentation.

Thanks for the suggestions. No more importing text into a spreadsheet, splitting into columns, and copy/pasting it back to a text editor for me.

Textpad does this.

Textmate and Vim as well

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