Column alignment

xl600

Yes, I know this has been talked about a million times. But I’ve never seen a real, general purpose, solution proposed other than the depreciated textFX plugin that has no 64bit version available.

Does anyone remember an old editor called CodeWright? Would it be too much to propose that notepad++ incorporate the same type of alignment functionality that offered. I’ll try to describe it…

When you select any text in column mode, pressing alt-tab makes the left edge of the column the effective screen edge and de-dents the text to the right. Exactly as notepad++ does when selecting full lines of text, but with an arbitrary left edge.

If you press tab with a column selected, the text to the right of the column is indented to the next tab stop while the column block is left selected (The cursor doesn’t move). Exactly as notepad++ does when selecting full lines of text.

Currently, notepad++ behaves very oddly when a column block is selected. If pressing tab, the highlighted text is overwritten with a tab or spaces. That seems pretty weird to me (If I wanted to delete the text, why not press backspace?). If pressing alt-tab, the left edge cursor is moved left (Why? What purpose does that serve?).

This has been the one low point in notepad++ so it’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. But an improvement akin to how Codewright’s columns functioned would be such a welcome sight for myself and (I suspect) thousands of other users wishing for an easy and simple way to align text to a visual column selection.

Alan Kilborn

@xl600

This has been the one low point in notepad++

So this is an editing function, and as such it is governed by Scintilla, Notepad++'s editing component (and a different project, maintained by different owners). So your complaint is better directed to them.

Notepad++ developers could change the functionality, but then they are at odds with future Scintilla development, and really, that would not be a productive way to spend one’s coding time.

xl600

Learn something new every day… Off to Scintilla.org to see what its all about!

Thanks :)

Ekopalypse

@xl600

Not exactly what you are looking for, but do you know the
BetterMultiSelection plugin?
It could be an alternative in the way you format your code.