Documentation enhancement to describe the process of aborting/exiting column mode via the Esc key

[turonosaurus]

I decided to investigate my inability to control / figure out how, in Notepad++, to control where the cursor lands when you're using Column mode and you hit your Esc key to exit/abort column mode. It seemed to me like usually it would fall after the selection but sometimes at the beginning, but I couldn't control it or predict where it was going to land. After searching online and in the Notepad++ documentation on this and finding nothing, I was about to submit a Bug report and, as I was thinking about the steps to reproduce it hit me! Where the cursor lands is dependent upon the direction you are going when you first make your selection at the point when you activate column mode.

• If I hold Alt+C and hit my up arrow key to select in the upwards direction, later when I hit Esc the cursor lands at the beginning of the selection.
• In contrast if I hold Alt+C and hit my down arrow key to select in the upwards direction, later when I hit Esc the cursor lands at the end of the selection.

With this realization I can see that it is working as designed - however - it would be nice if Notepad++'s documentation had explicitly spelled this out for me - and for the community of users. I would think that this "Selection modes & Column Editor" article should get updated appropriately to convey this information.

[pryrt]

Alt+C doesn't do column selection; Alt+C is the column editor (for adding numbering to a column). Column-mode selection is done by holding down Alt while dragging, or holding down Alt while Shift+Arrow to select.

So, if you mean that "if you have a column selection (whether by Alt+MouseDrag or Alt+Shift+Arrow), then hitting ESC will leave column-selection mode and the typing caret will be at the last corner of your selection. Thus, if you did your column selection from upper-left to lower-right, the caret will be in the lower right after the ESC; if you did your column selection from upper-right to lower-left, the caret will be in the lower left after the ESC; if you do the column selection from lower-left to upper-right, then the caret will end up in the upper right after the ESC; and if you do the column selection from lower-right to upper-left, then the caret will end up in the upper-left after ESC." -- I wouldn't have thought that needed explaining, since the typing caret ends up a the whichever side of the selection you ended the selection at for normal (non-column) selections as well... but if you think I need to make that clear, I can.

[turonosaurus]

Hi @pryrt. Yes, you knew exactly what I meant to say! Alt + C was a typo - my mistake! Thank you. 👍