I've been asked to implement a column selection mode in the editor. Instead of requiring that the alt key be pressed to make a rectangular selection, you can just toggle all selections to be rectangular or not. A lot of people don't know that rectangular selections are possible much less the key combination to do it so this is supposed to be a bit more obvious. I'm not crazy about the request because it's more of a documentation issue but I'm begrudgingly doing it.
Before I digging around in Scintilla to add this feature, I checked the documentation to see if it's already possible. I thought SCI_SETSELECTIONMODE might be what I need but it doesn't seem to do what I want. As a matter fact, it doesn't seem to do anything because setting it to SC_SEL_RECTANGLE doesn't seem to have any effect on making a selection. Am I just using it wrong? All I did was set SCI_SETSELECTIONMODE to SC_SEL_RECTANGLE and try to make a selection with both keyboard and mouse. I just got a regular selection instead of a rectangular one. Am I just misunderstanding what it does or using it incorrectly? The mode is currently toggled by a menu item.
I should note that I'm currently implementing this on a Mac which is my preferred development environment but will be porting this over to the Windows and GTK+ versions too.