How do I enable the column selection mode in Eclipse?

Question

News wrote that Eclipse 3.5 finally supports column selection. Unfortunately I don\'t know HOW to enable it. I tried pressing the ALT-key like I am used to in Visual Studio

Answer 1

A different approach:

The vrapper plugin emulates vim inside the Eclipse editor. One of its features is visual block mode which works fine inside Eclipse.

It is by default mapped to Ctrl-V which interferes with the paste command in Eclipse. You can either remap the visual block mode to a different shortcut, or remap the paste command to a different key. I chose the latter: remapped the paste command to Ctrl-Shift-V to match my terminal's behavior.

Answer 2

You can enable and disable column editing mode via the keyboard shortcut ALT-SHIFT-A.

Once enabled you can then use either the mouse to select a block of text, or the keyboard using SHIFT (like a normal keyboard select, except the selection will now be in a block).

If you've changed your default font for text editing, entering column editing mode will probably change your screen font to the default column editing font (which is probably different to your changed font. To change the font when in column editing mode, go to the menu and select Window -> Preferences, then in the tree on the left hand side, pick General -> Appearance -> Colors and Fonts, and then pick Basic -> Text Editor Block Selection Font on the right hand side tree. You can then select the font to be consistent with your "not in column editing mode" font.