About

The Extra Selection adds the following functions:

Goto matching brace and select (Select to matching brace).

Goto line and select (Select to line).

Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Left/Right/Home/End keys - same as Ctrl-Shift, but for rectangular selection.

Column mode - while active, all (Ctrl)-Shift-movement keys do rectangle selection instead of stream.

"Movement keys" refers to the arrows, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down.

For more information, see the Usage section below.

Requirements

Geany 0.18 or later and the respective headers and development libraries.

Installation

Compiling and installing the code is done by the following three commands:

$ ./waf configure $ ./waf build $ ./waf install

For more configuration details run $ ./waf --help

If there are any errors during compilation, check your build environment.

Usage

Under Tools -> Extra Selection, there are 3 new items: "Column mode", "Select to line" and "Select to matching brace". Normally these should be bound to keys, for example Alt-c, Alt-Shift-l and Control-Shift-b. Now:

  1. Position the cursor on an opening brace and invoke "Select to matching brace". The cursor will move to the closing brace, and the braced area will be selected.

  2. Position the cursor on line 10, invoke "Select to line" and enter 15. The cursor will move to line 15, and the area between the previous and the new current cursor position will be selected.

  3. Select a small rectangular area and press Control-Alt-Shift-Right. The cursor will move to the next word, extending the rectangurar selection. The complete new keys list is:

    Control-Alt-Shift Extends the selection to ----------------- ------------------------ Left Previous word Right Next word Up Previous paragraph Down Next paragraph Home Start of file End End of file

Unfortunately, holding Alt for rectangular selection has some problems, which apply both to the standard Geany keys and these added by the plugin. Under Windows, Alt and the keypad keys generate unicodes, even if used with Shift or Control. With X11, some Alt-(Ctrl)-(Shift)-movement keys may be used by the window manager for switching to the previous/next desktop, moving windows etc. So then:

  1. Turn "Column mode" on. While active, the (Control)-Shift-movement keys will select a rectangle instead of stream without the need to hold Alt (in fact, the (Control)-Alt-Shift-movement keys will be temporarily blocked). This way, you will avoid the Alt key problems mentioned above, and it's move convinient to select while holding Shift only.

Known issues

The column mode is global, not per-document. However, (de)activating it will change the selection (if any) to stream/rectangle for the current document only.

The column mode applies to the movement keys only - not to mouse selection, find functions etc.

License

Extra Selection is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. A copy of this license can be found in the file COPYING included with the source code of this program.

Ideas, questions, patches and bug reports

Dimitar Zhekov <dimitar.zhekov@gmail.com>