a python script could, temporarily, write a descriptive ruler as first line and keep it always visible.
It could reformat the doc to have it more columnized or …

Or it could overwrite a statusbar section. E.g the DOCTYPE section, the leftmost section on the bottom to show the current column
or it could use npps second view to display it.

If you are willing to install python script plugin I could try to write a script which does what you want.
If so, please let me know what exactly should be done.

Cheers
Claudia

Since the lines can have different layouts, number of fields and also fieldwidth, the ruler would have to adapt to the setup of the line the cursor is in.

If the file consists of header, detail and footer records, it could look like:

H;Col1 ;Col2 ;Col3
D;Col1_______;Col2;____________Col3;__________Col4;________Col5
F;Col1;___Col2;_________Col3

Thank you for your quick response.

Changing the file is not really intended. Furthermore the additional line would scroll out of sight, when moving downwards in the file. I don’t know if i can freeze the top-line in notepad++.

What i’d like to achieve would be a ruler at the top of the window (like the tabulator display in MS-Word), where i can see the field-separator-positions and so the number of the column i am in.

not quite sure if I understand this correctly but how do you load the file?
Does it already has been reformatted or is just the plain text file like

text,text,text,text,...

and you want to have something like

1;   2;   3;   4;...
text;text;text;text;...

??

If so, no, afaik there isn’t a built in feature - I could come up with a python script but this
would change the document by adding the numbers on top of the file. Don’t know it this is desired.

Cheers
Claudia

Cheers
Claudia