11
8
TL;DR - How can I enable virtual spaces to move the cursor past the end of a line of text?
Long version - In Notepad++, when trying to select (using the mouse) a long line of text that extends past the right edge of the window, causing it to scroll horizontally, my mouse will sometimes go slightly up or down enough to move the cursor to the adjacent (usually much shorter) line, causing the cursor to snap back to the left where that adjacent line ends; which in turn scrolls the window horizontally back to the left, making it difficult to quickly readjust and finish dragging out my selection.
Some (though woefully few) text editors have an option for "virtual spaces", or cursoring past the EOL, to make it much easier to mouse/arrow around without being restricted to existing text/whitespace.
How can I make this happen in Notepad++ (without hacking the source myself)?
1start of line, hold SHIFT + END, have the whole line selected? I know it's not the same as what you wanted, but it's what I do. – Rob – 2012-03-16T17:50:45.047
1Not what you ask, but the problem would go away with line wrapping. – Eroen – 2012-03-16T17:55:30.390
@Rob: This is generally an issue when I'm trying to select a specific long chunk of a very long line of code, but that line is intermingled with other much shorter lines. I could also use SHIFT + CTRL + RIGHTARROW to quickly select rightward from my starting point one word at a time, Notepad++ is pretty good at detecting word-break characters such as periods, parentheses, etc. when there aren't any actual spaces separating words (such as in a long object reference) e.g. (javascript):
someObjectName.subObject.property['index'](parameter)
– acatalept – 2012-03-16T18:00:37.310@Eroen: glad you suggested this, I haven't used word-wrap in N++ for a long time, as it used to bring the program to its knees with large files... but it actually works very nicely even for my bigger 20k line files, and even lines up indents on wrapped lines ;) – acatalept – 2012-03-16T18:05:52.700