column mode editing [Imported Thread]

This is maybe too much trouble but I really like having a column mode for editing.

You can highlight a 'rectangle' to cut/paste
that is NOT at end of or start of a line.

or 'tab' over or 'cut' a few columns from the middle of the text.

If you have used

Idea Originally Posted by: rsn 16/06/2009

01/07/2014 Joe Merten

Also Eclipse, Codewright and JE (my own one) have this (very usefule) capability.

26/06/2014 rsn

So very curious what editor you saw and how this will work. It may be a real pain to add column mode to Crossworks so it might not be doable but for those that use it in other editors get a lot of use out of it. I did use it yesterday and will likely use it tommorrow. But I'm certainly open to new ideas if someone lets me know what they are

12/03/2013 Jonathan Elliott (Admin)

OK, so I have seen the light. Well, seen another editor to be fair, and column mode editing is just so yesterday. My problem with column-mode editing is that it just didn't have enough flexibility to be useful and internally column-mode editing would be problematic to implement. I've now seen something that is much more powerful and is both simpler to implement and more complex to implement at the same time. So, this is going to get implemented as soon as I have some spare time after the immediate task of the CrossWorks 3 release.

16/07/2012 Kevin Brewster

I regularly open CrossWorks source files in TextPad or Notepad++, both of which support column (block) editing. I think it's a great feature and I miss it in CrossWorks.

22/08/2011 John

Column mode is very useful for editing tables and arrays. I would really like to see it implemented even if only as a cut and paste implementation. I think you could inhibit all the other functions like search and such for column edit mode. Most people will just use it for cut and paste anyways.

15/02/2010 Jonathan Elliott (Admin)

This is certainly more difficult to implement than you would first imagine. Cut, copy, and paste certainly are not difficult to implement in column mode. However, what about all the other actions that happen to work on a selection? I'm thinking of things like "search in selection", "replace in selection", tab/detab, all the change case actions? It's more complex than you initially think!

15/02/2010 Graham Cole

This really would be useful and, surely, not to difficult to implement.

22/08/2009 dario

column mode is especially useful when you want to edit tables. just as an example you get an hex file and want to quickly convert it to a structure of bytes... just select a column every two and type ,0x for each column and you have the structure done. same goes for structure initialization where you want to add a field... of course you can do the same with macros but column editing seems much more straightforward

13/07/2009 Jonathan Elliott (Admin)

This is something I'd like to do at some point, but I've not really seen the need for column-mode editing. None of my source files happen to "line up" such that column-mode editing would be a benefit.