N++ as @donho said recently that Scintilla is gonna get updated soon! :

that would be cool because it would introduce other cool features like better
multiple edits as well :-)

the scintilla version 3.5.6 used by notepad++ hasn’t this feature.

True, but @Michael-Vincent , keep an eye on N++ as @donho said recently that Scintilla is gonna get updated soon! :)

the scintilla version 3.5.6 used by notepad++ doesn’t have this feature.

Admittedly, it’s a hack and I don’t know enough of the N++, Scintilla or just plain C++ programming for that matter to do something really cool - that’s why I piggy-back on other’s work and just make improvements. In any case, I had a look at keeping the edge marker and adding a second vertical line to track position instead of hijacking the edge marker - it seems you can do this:

https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html#SCI_MULTIEDGEADDLINE

but I don’t see how you then control the second edge. There’s just a call to add one at a location and then to clear all of them.

Ah, okay…so it’s a feature. At first I was thinking I didn’t like it, but the more I consider it…

It really is OK, just knowing that it is possible to turn it on in when needed.

My first thought was that it should always be on, and I had a special reason: It helps you locate the caret very quickly if you’ve lost track of it. With the N++ native current line highlight feature enabled, plus this one, you get a crosshairs of caret location.

Since you seem receptive to critique, :) , it would be nice if it also worked (both features, ruler and column-indicator) when the caret is in virtual-space land, but perhaps that isn’t possible (given that you are working within the bounds of what the Scintilla vertical edge can do).

Anyway, thanks again for sharing this great plugin. And I do realize that your purpose in starting this thread was for a different purpose!

Alas, I gave it a shot and you can find the result here:
https://github.com/vinsworldcom/nppColumnTools/tree/develop

Both 32 and 64 bit - I tested a bit with the 64-bit version. There’s still a danger of editing the config file directly or changing the setting in N++ menu as described above and getting things out of sync.

One minor point…

@Michael-Vincent

So my “minor point” from earlier wasn’t a bug report, but now I have one. The “Column highlight” option doesn’t retain its “on” setting from run to run of Notepad++. Do you want bug reports here (since you are not taking “ownership”), as issues on the github site (where your “ownership” gets solidified), or, as I suspect…you don’t want them at all? :)

I built ColumnTools from source and all went just fine. I tried it out functionally and I like it. Specifically the vertical column marker. Very nice plugin.

Occasionally I have the need to line up things vertically that are a distance apart but still on one screen–this plugin will help with that task in the future.

One minor point: I was a bit confused by the “Enable” menu option, but some experimentation showed how it worked. I think I would have left out the “Enable” option, but it is fine. I think if it was called “Quick Enable All” then I wouldn’t have had any confusion.

The 32-bit only I’m trying to convert are:
dbgpPlugin
MultiClipboard
SourceCookifier (possibly, although TagLEET seems to address this Feature acceptably)

Some can done with the build-in Plugin Admin, some with the older Plugin Manager and some manual intervention, some require a direct download, possible compile and manual install.

Like I said, none of the above are my “creations”, they’re my improvements on seemingly “dead” (aka: abandoned) N++ plugins.

Was “Column Tools” really a holdout? It appears to be your own original creation? So don’t you control its bitness, directly?

I guess it is good to push 64-bit Notepad++ usage forward, if you can (and as you are doing), but really, there is nothing forcing that move. AFAIK there are no plans to eliminate 32-bit releases (but I have no insider knowledge about this).

There still is no great advantage in 64-bit N++ over 32-bit. Maybe you can open some larger files, but certainly still not huge files like everyone seems to expect. I believe Scintilla plays a larger role in that than N++ 64 vs 32.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-plugins/files/MultiClipboard/MultiClipboard 2.1 unicode/

and spoke with the author who wasn’t really interested in making 64-bit due to time constraints. I can try to put a GitHub repo up, but it’d just be my changes since unfortunately I didn’t git init the directory I unzipped the original source into. First commit would be all of my changes already. OK?

I’m trying Multiclipboard but even after clearing all warnings in the source files and compiling successfully, it just crashes in N++

This sound like 32bit/64bit pointer/integer issue.
Do you have a github repo?