Rectangular Text Selections

Rectangular text selections in BBEdit 7.0! (Make sure you’re not in soft-wrap mode, then Opt-drag your selection). This is one of those features you don’t use often, but when you do it’s a life-saver. I used to make frequent use of rectangular selections in Pe for BeOS (now Pepper) and had requested this on the BBEdit mailing list – apparently I wasn’t the only one. Awesome.

Music: Freakwater :: Binding Twine

3 Replies to “Rectangular Text Selections”

  1. i recall wordperfect had that feature. remind me of the situation when it’s useful?

    still tweaking the colors in your desing? nice… i like hte gutter between the main column and the side column.

    how does your page look in safari? the main blog column at radiofreeblogistan.com turns invisible!

  2. I find it useful in, say instances where you might have some html like this:

    img src=”foo.jpg” alt=”bar” height=”
    img src=”and.jpg” alt=”and” height=”
    img src=”so.jpg” alt=”so” height=”
    img src=”the.jpg” alt=”the” height=”

    Now let’s say you want to remove all those alt tags. Quickly. Without doing regex. With the mouse. No problem – just drage a vertical rectangle over them and delete.

    Haven’t tweaked the design here for the past three-four weeks – I’m pretty happy with it now, although I hear it *still* has some issues in IE6/Win (truncating bottom of page?). The gutter shows up in IE5/Mac only, AFAIK. No gutter in Chimera or Safari. The page looks great in Safari, I’m very happy. I reported the blogistan/safari bug to Apple when I seen it.

  3. I played with the rectangular selection in vim a bit when I first discovered it, but have never seen much use for it (for me) once I got past the gee-whiz feeling…

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