Feature Request - Column Highlighting

Thanks for the suggestion. We do already have that on the TODO list. What sort of object model changes/enhancements do you think we'd need to implement to handle that since the Selection object currently is only designed for normal text selection?

This is a feature I've been hoping for as well. <IMG SRC="biggrin.gif" border="0">

You could possibly treat the column-based selection as a collection of normal selections since all the standard properties/methods of a selection should still apply to a single line within the column-based selection.

I think you could add maybe a few fields to the Selection object to handle it:

SelectionType : Standard | Column
Rows : int

Then, if the user performs a standard selection, StartOffset and EndOffset would be expected values and SelectionType would be Standard and Rows would be 0

If user did column selection, then StartOffSet would be basically the first column on first row, EndOffset would be last column on first row and then rows would indicates how many lines/rows to copy that substring for.

Then to get selection you could either provide a method or user could get selection by takin substring of current row and substring of subsequent rows up to StartRow + Row or something.

Getting the text is the easy part I think. I think the hard part will be doing the selection around the text since you have to handle proportional and nonproportional fields although I just checked and VS simply staggers the columns to match column positions in non-prop fonts.

Thanks

Back in the day.... we developed our own programmer's editor for the Amiga (ahhh, the Amiga). One cool thng was that we supported arbitrary span marking, "column" marking and even disjointed marking for selection. Disjoined line selection was actually very useful in day to day editing tasks. I haven't seen that sort of thing in modern editors... though I haven't looked at them all.

-- David