Columnar Behavior and Caret Manipulations for tk.Text

Controls:

• Box selection begins by putting the caret at the index where you want to start the selection, and pressing Alt+Shift.
  
  From there you have 3 options:

  • LMB+DRAG to drag out a box-selection
  • LMB at the point you want the selection to end. If you don't release you can still drag to adjust.
  • press Arrow keys in the direction that you want the box to expand/contract. (NumPad Arrows NOT supported)

• Creating a box-selection of no width will produce a multiline-caret.

  • You can type at the multiline-caret, and whatever you type will appear on every active line.
  • Pressing BackSpace will perform a backspace operation on every active line.

• After Making a box-selection and while the selection is still active, pressing Shift+Arrow will move the entire selection in the arrow direction. This counts for multiline-carets, as well.

• Any selection can be drag-dropped.

  • Press and hold LMB over a selection to grab, then drag and drop in a new location.
  • In the case of box-selections there is a vertical offset applied to grab and drop. If you grabbed at (ex) the third row of a column, you would have to drop where you want the third row to be.

• With a box-selection active, pressing Return will deselect and leave the multiline-caret behind, wherever it was. Pressing Return while in multiline-caret mode will do nothing.

• With any selection active, pressing Left or Right will deselect and move the caret to the beginning (left) or end (right) of the former selection

• Cut, Copy and Paste work the same as you would expect and the hotkeys are no different. In or from box-select mode these are performed with column behavior.

• Any method of box-selection can be performed in any direction

Features:

• A faint highlight is applied to the background of the line the caret is on ~ the "active line"

• Multiline-carets always have a brighter portion that reflects where the real caret is

• While you are in the process of dragging a selection the real caret is revealed and joins the active line highlight in following your cursor.

Glitches:

• On very rare occassions, releasing Alt from the hotkey combo will result in the window gaining focus, and the text area seeming to freeze. If this happens just press Alt again. ~ This issue may be resolved. Conditions have been added that force focus back to the text widget. The issue was already hard to duplicate so there is no way to be positive it's fixed. Time will tell.