Select non consecutive blocks of lines using CTRL not working, selects all instead
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Hello,
This is driving me crazy, I searched Google and the only answer everyone gives is to activate multi-editing… The problem I’ll be describing here is there regardless of if multi-editing is activated or not.
Let’s say I have this file here:
Text on line 1
Text on line 2
Text on line 3
Text on line 4
Text on line 5
Text on line 6
Text on line 7
Text on line 8
Text on line 9
Text on line 10
Text on line 11
Text on line 12
Text on line 13
Text on line 14
… (keeps going like this)WHAT I WANT TO DO:
I want to scroll down my file and select all the lines I want to select when I find one. These may or may not be consecutive, and there may be some blocks of multiple lines I want to select at once, and then keep scrolling down the file.
The logical way I see this would be working is similar to Excel… I would just select the lines clicking in the margin, sometimes selecting a few lines at a time by clicking and dragging on a few lines, then keeping scrolling down my file and once I find more lines I want to add to the selection, I would just hold CTRL and select more lines…
THE PROBLEM:
Right now, when I want to select only one or consecutive lines in Notepad++, I just click on the left of the line number in the margin and it selects the line, and I can click and drag down if I want to select multiple lines.
However, as soon as I hit CTRL and go to a non consecutive line to select it, it selects all text in file instead… I mean, why would we even need another “select-all” when everyone knows that virtually everywhere this can be accomplished by CTRL-A? I feel like this is just like removing a very important feature just to add another CTRL-A…
CURRENT OPTIONS (NOT WORKING SO WELL):
Currently, I only have 2 options to accomplish what I want, and they are not that good…
Option 1 is I could click on the right of the line numbers in the margin to add bookmarks and then use bookmarks to select all bookmarked lines. However, if I find a block of 30 consecutive lines I want to select, this means I would have to click 30 times in the margin to bookmarks those lines instead of just clicking and dragging down on the 30 lines.
Option 2 is I could click just before the first character of the line (between margin and first character), and drag the cursor down to select one or more lines, the hit CTRL and do this on other lines… However, when I am being zoomed out, and the text is really really small, it can become quite a challenge to click exactly before the first character and dragging down without selecting too few and too less of what I want to select.
Why wouldn’t I just be allowed to select the whole lines I want to select using the “select line” function that is already there clicking left of the line number?
Thanks for help!
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The only way I got around this is after enabling multi editing is by
holding ctrl and do a triple click in the line of interest -
This is working! Thanks a lot for this solution!
Still not the “perfect” solution, but I’ll remember that.
I would really love to hear an original developer comment on why they decided to add a second CTRL-A function exactly at the place where it should “naturally” be a multiple line select function!
