Mr Speaker

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).