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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T15:37:09+00:00

Longtime Eclipse user here; I recently discovered the Block Selection Mode (Alt-Shift-A) that was

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Longtime Eclipse user here; I recently discovered the “Block Selection Mode” (Alt-Shift-A) that was added into Eclipse 3.5. I tried it out, it’s pretty neat–I can select a rectangle of text in my source code instead of selecting things a line at a time like I usually do.

Apparently this feature is common in other editors too, under other names like “column edit mode”, etc. A lot of people seem to really love it, but I’ve got by without for a long time.

So my question is: What kinds of things is this feature useful for?

The only one I can think of is inserting a comment characters (like // or #) in front of a chunk of text. Also, I supposed if I had a bunch of variables names that were all lined up and I wanted to change the first characters for all of them at once. But surely there’s more to it than that? I mean, when it comes to choosing an editor, this feature is apparently a deal-breaker for some people!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I find it is very useful when working with fixed-position field data files, and you only want to select a few fields for search-replace or copy-paste. It is also good for things like this:

    call_foo('A',123);
call_foo('B',143);
call_foo('C',331);
call_foo('A',113);
call_foo('R',789);

    The code is all the same except for some characters in some columns. You could select a block around the second parameter and search for the line containing 113. Useful when you have more than just a few lines all together in this format.

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