Odd editor behavior in CVI 2015

[HowardE]

I have an installation of 2015 that has been working fine for years. It *just* got into a mood where the text editor isn't right.  I should be able to go the beginning of a line, hold shift and press a down arrow and highlight a line.  The highlighting now treats the screen as a collection of X/Y characters instead of knowing that each line is connected to the next.  So to highlight a block of three lines, I have to start at the beginning of one line, hold the shift and move to the right until I've gone as far as the longest line, then go down three.  It;s more like copying  block of an image in Photoshop than a text editor.

Is this some strange mode that got activated accidentally?  Is there a way of fixing it without a reinstall?

[HowardE · Accepted solution]

Found it - it's a weird editor mode.  In the lower right corner of the screen is an icon that toggles what I'll call "normal editing" mode to what I'll call "useless, annoying editor mode".  Why it's there, I have no clue, but I must have clicked on it.  The attachment has a picture of the icon.

All's right with the world now.  

[RobertoBozzolo]

That icon is theText Selection Mode one: it permits you to switch among line, block and column selection mode. It is associated also toCtrl + Ins shortcut, so you may have pressed that combination by accident to change it. This feature is described here in detail, and despite what you may think I consider it a useful feature and apply the appropriate selection  mode depending on what I have to do.

It's a pity it has been lost in CVI2019!

[RobertoBozzolo]

By the way, this feature is present in all versions of CVI at least starting from 2009: I cannot be sure for previous versions since I have no running installs of older CVIs.

And again, it's a pity it has been lost: the alternatives introduced in CVI2019 are not so handy

[rolfk]

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@RobertoBozzolo wrote:

By the way, this feature is present in all versions of CVI at least starting from 2009: I cannot be sure for previous versions since I have no running installs of older CVIs.

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It was in LabWindows/CVI as far back as 3.x and may have been present even in the DOS versions, but that is definitely to far back to be sure about. And yes I really liked this feature and frequently missed it in other code editors.

[HowardE]

If you find it useful then I suppose it is. The only thing I can imagine it's good for is possibly converting captured spreadsheet data into a data structure in code. Even then, there are far better tools (editing macros in EMACS for one).

It doesn't seem like it would have been a big deal to have left it in, but maybe it just wasn't a sufficiently popular feature.