How To Make Column-Mode Selection in Visual Studio

All text-editors on Windows, including Visual Studio; generally operates in line-mode (and implicitly stream-mode too).

Stream mode selects text in a “stream”, beginning with the first character selected and ending with the last character, just as if you were reading the text. Line mode selects full lines of text. Both of them are characteristically equal in terms of their modus operandi, i.e. they work in lines; it’s just a matter of how much texts are covered by the selection (either all or some).

There’re some circumstances where you want to select in columns instead of lines. Selecting text in column mode is similar to drawing a rectangle around the text you wish to select. See the differences in the following figure:

Many people do not know about the column-mode selection in Visual Studio, but it’s just as simple as holding the ALT key while rubberbanding your text (selecting text by dragging the mouse). Pretty handy, huh?