Here's a helpful little mouse-wielding tip for all you Windows users out there (Oops, "mouse" and "Windows" - there goes my geek cred.)... Did you know that you can vertically select text in some programs? Well you can, with the power of ALT + mouse!
Selecting text with a mouse is a very important computer-user skill, that enables you to capture parts of a paragraph or sentence for use in other applications.
But what if, right, you wanted to extract just the messages from the text below, and paste them somewhere else:
14:18:27 DEBUG: OnItemRemoved from cache
14:18:56 DEBUG: Initialise Application
14:19:14 DEBUG: MemberCurrent unavailable
14:22:21 DEBUG: IRegistrationModule added
Well, you could select it all, paste it to the destination, then remove the timestamp from each line... but if there was 20 gazillion lines that'd take a while...
ALT + mouse!
If you had that list opened up in Notepad++, Microsoft products (Word, Visual Studio, SQL Server Management thingo, Outlook...), and most likely many others, you could use the not-often-enough used ALT key to help you out.
Simply hold down ALT then make your selection - notice that you are free to roam the screen, unrestricted by the text below!
Kid Koala - 01 - Strat Hear
Kid Koala - 02 - Basin Street Blues
Kid Koala - 03 - Radio Nufonia
Kid Koala - 04 - Stompin' At Le Savoi
Kid Koala - 05 - Space Cadet 2
Kid Koala - 06 - Grandmaphone Speaks
You can also paste a selection vertically as well, which is pretty damn cool.
It seems to work with a bunch of Microsoft products (it works on Word on Mac, but sadly not Notepad), and a few other text editors I tried.
It doesn't work on Linux, as ALT + Mouse moves the current screen around (which is also very handy) - Though if you're using Linux then you don't touch the mouse anyway, and you would have regex-ed out the result before you even had a chance to think about it.
There you go
A bonus handy-hint: if your vertical lines don't match-up happily, try converting the font to a monospace font (like Courier).
5 Comments
That is very handy, indeed. Thanks!
In Word you can also hold down CTRL select bits of a document. Kinda like “selective selection” of sorts.
Eg – http://www.flickr.com/photos/delicategenius/1289630495/
Let me try again in engrish – In Word you can also hold down CTRL to select bits of a document.
Oooh, nice tip Delicate Genius – pity it doesn’t work in VS2005. That’d be quite handy!
Freakin brilliant