There is no command to select a column in entire file. The column mode is usually used (by programmers using UltraEdit) just with a small rectangular selection created by first enabling column mode with
Alt+C and then pressing and holding left mouse button while moving mouse pointer (cursor) or pressing and holding key
Shift while moving the caret (text cursor) with the caret moving keys. It is also possible to press and hold key
Alt and press and hold left mouse button while moving mouse pointer (cursor) to make a rectangular selection even if column mode is not yet enabled (quick column mode selection).
There is the command
Select range in popup menu of first item
Select on ribbon tab
Edit. This command is often used to make a large rectangular selection. The end line number can be also much greater than the number of lines the file currently has. For that reason this command can be used to quickly create a rectangular selection for the entire file with 0 to n columns selected.
But I use for selecting 0 to n columns in entire file a different method. I press
Ctrl+Home to move caret to top of the file and
Alt+C to enable the column mode. I next move caret with key
Right Arrow and
Ctrl+Right Arrow to the column on which the column(s) selection should start. Then I press
Ctrl+Shift+End and keep holding
Shift while pressing key
Up Arrow (last line in file has a line termination) and moving the caret to right or left with
Right Arrow and
Ctrl+Right Arrow or
Left Arrow and
Ctrl+Left Arrow. That is a quite quick method to select 0 or more columns in all lines of a file if the file has not thousands of columns.
Please note that there are the column commands:
- Insert/fill columns to insert/fill a string at the current column according to caret position and all lines below or just all selected lines.
- Cut columns to cut one or more columns according to caret position and all lines below or just all selected lines.
- Delete columns to delete one or more columns according to caret position and all lines below or just all selected lines.
There is no command to copy columns. But it is possible to use
Cut columns and
Ctrl+V to get columns copied to clipboard and keep the columns which should just be copied and not cut.
It is of course also possible to make a rectangular selection and use
Ctrl+C and
Ctrl+X and
Ctrl+V as in normal text editing mode. It is also often useful to make a rectangular selection over multiple lines with no column selected (no character selected) and then just type the string to insert in the selected lines at the current position of the caret.
It takes a while to detect all the features UltraEdit has on working with column mode including the different behavior on having additionally overstrike mode enabled whereby the column mode editing behavior with overstrike active can be customized in configuration. I use column mode quite often and I am used to do everything in column mode using only keys for maximum editing efficiency.
