Sublime Forum

Vertical (column) selection using keyboard

#1

After searching the forum for a while I found out from this thread that Sublime’s way of doing vertical selection is shift+right click and drag. Better than nothing, but I’d prefer to do it with my keyboard.

Other applications (at least Notepad++ and Word iirc) that support vertical selection use the shortcut alt+shift+up/down. This shortcut doesn’t exist in Sublime, sadly.

I read through Default.sublime-keymap, but can’t see any commands that appear to deal with vertical selections. Does this file include every single command support by Sublime, or is it possible there’s a hidden command for this that I could use to create my own key binding? If not, may I request this be added to a future version?

Edit: Added “column” to the thread title to make it possible to find this thread if someone searches for column selection.

0 Likes

#2

Try Ctrl+Alt+Up or Down

And be sure to read this, very helpful: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/selection

0 Likes

#3

Not quite what I was after, but ctrl+alt+up/down to place the cursor on all the lines I want, then shift+left/right afterwards covers most use cases I have. Thanks!

0 Likes

#4

It’s important to understand that Sublime’s way is not column select, but rather just adding more cursors.
This is much more powerful than the old column-select way, so I highly recommend you mess around with it a bit.

0 Likes

#5

but how to turn off this vertical selection…

also i’m not sure of usability of two things:

  1. when lines and words aren’t in same size, i always lost cursor…
  2. simple column selection without pressing ctrl+alt+arrow and then shift + arrow - just alt for cursor moving, or alt+shift should be enough, on release it should turn off
0 Likes