We’re all very much used to selecting text by clicking and dragging the mouse. But by pressing the Alt key while doing that, you can select a rectangular block. This feature has been around since Visual Studio 2010 – part of it even since Visual Studio 2008 – and it’s available in most modern text editors such as Notepad++. However, most people seem not to be aware of this, which is why I’m writing this article.

Let’s say you created a new Console Application in Visual Studio, and added a few variables within the Program class:

    class Program
    {
        int name;
        int age;
        int address;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            
        }
    }

Oops. Main() can’t access them, because it is static, and they are not. We’re going to have to make them static as well.

Now we can add the static keyword to each variable, one by one. Or, we can place the cursor before the first int, press Alt, click and drag downwards to create a sort of blue cursor that spans multiple lines. It’s a bit hard to see, so I’ve zoomed in a bit here:

With that, we’ve enabled column editing. This means that whatever you type will now be written in multiple lines:

You can use this to comment lines in bulk (similar to the Ctrl+K+C or Ctrl+E+C shortcuts, depending on your editor settings):

Now, column editing is actually a special case of block selection with a width of zero. To see how block editing works, let’s change our variable names to the following:

        static int personName;
        static int personAge;
        static int personAddress;

Now, due to changing requirements, we decided that these shouldn’t be called person*, but customer*. Given that the variable names are nicely aligned underneath each other, we can press Alt, click and drag around person on all three lines, and we’ve made a block selection:

Press Backspace to remove person from all three lines. The block collapses to zero width, so we’re back to column editing, and we can now easily write customer on all three lines:

So there you go. Block selection and column editing are nothing new, but they’re very handy and good to know about.