It’s the Simple Things

You have to love the simple things that save time and make your life easier. Years ago, back in the days of DOS, I used an editor named Brief. Brief was published by a company named UnderWare and was later acquired by Borland. Borland still has Brief emulation in their editors and so do other publishers. One of the things I liked about Brief and missed in the Visual Studio IDE editor is the ability to select columns of text. It’s the little things I miss when they aren’t available.

One day while editing some code in Visual Studio I accidently selected columns of text. I didn’t know what I had done to cause the column selection but set out on a search for the magic keystroke combination that would duplicate my fat-fingering and bring column selection home to me. After a little trial and error, I discovered that like holding down the shift key while moving the cursor to select rows of text, if I add the Alt key to that combination I can select columns. Interestingly, you have to use Alt-Shift with the arrow keys to select columns with the keyboard, but just Alt will do if you select columns by holding down the left mouse button and dragging the mouse. Don’t ask me why it works like that; it does and I’m loving it.