Column Editor Issue.........

廖红贵

select Edit->Column Editor menu item, then select ‘Number to insert’ functionality and input ‘Initial number’, ‘Increase by’, ‘Repeat’, then click the <ok> button, it doesn’t work.

PeterJones

@廖红贵 , welcome to the Notepad++ Community. You said:

it doesn’t work.

You didn’t mention the critical step: from my experiments, my guess is that your “doesn’t work” result is that it inserted a single number (whatever you had defined as “initial number”). And if that was your symptom, then I can explain the root cause: you didn’t list a step in your sequence which is critical to the functioning of the column editor. The column editor requires that you select the column first – either Alt+DragMouse or Alt+Shift+Arrow keys. (Or, if you don’t have any existing text in your document yet, ENTER a whole bunch of new lines, and select all those empty lines with Ctrl+A, or your favorite way.) If you only have one row selected in your column, it will only insert one number from the sequence you defined; if you have N rows selected, it will insert N rows from your sequence.

So, if I have Initial Number = 1, Increase By = 2, Repeat = 3, but only have my normal cursor, without having selected a column, it will just insert the single number 1 on that line where my cursor was. If I delete that, then create a total of 18 blank lines in my document, select them all (or a column from them) and hit OK again with those same settings, I get:

If you cannot get it to work even when you have a multi-row column selected, then you will need to provide more information. The ? > Debug Info > Copy debug info into clipboard will be critical to us being able to replicate (or give counter example) your experience, to help confirm whether you’ve found a bug or just done something wrong. Using a screen-capture/animated-gif program (ScreenToGif, for example), post the image to a host like imgur.com, and embed the image using syntax like ![](http://i.imgur.com/QTHZysa.png) (making sure to link to the image with the .gif extension, not the .gifv or no-extension), will show us what you’re really doing.

If you need more clarity for my example, let me know and I’ll make an animated gif for you.

廖红贵

thank you for the response! first I let editor go into column mode and select 10 rows, when I input the following values:
Initial Number = 1, Increase By = 1, Repeat = 10, but I get the results as below:

1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1

nothing to be inserted in the selected rows(still keep empty).

Michael Vincent

You want:

Initial Number = 1, Increase By = 1, Repeat = 1

The repeat is how many times to repeat each number before moving to the next, so highlighting only 10 lines will only show the 10 '1’s. Try highlighting 100 lines then do your above and it will work, although probably not what you want.

PeterJones

@廖红贵 said:

select 10 rows, when I input the following values: Initial Number = 1, Increase By = 1, Repeat = 10,

You selected 10 rows, and told to count up from 1, repeating each number 10x. So the first 10 rows were 1, like you told it to do. To see the 2, you would have to have more than 10 lines selected.

You should probably start with something simpler and easier to see, like 1,1,1, which will just count from 1 to N for the N lines you select:

![](https://i.imgur.com/e3XaORb.gif):