AppCode 2018.3 Help

Selecting Text in the Editor

The basic way to select a piece of text is to extend the selection with the mouse cursor. AppCode, as a keyboard-centric IDE, suggests to use navigation keys to make selections.

You can opt to select pieces of text, or select rectangular fragments in the column mode, extend and shrink the selection, use multiselection, and sticky selection.

Selecting all text in the active editor tab

To select the entire text in the current editor tab, do one of the following:

  • On the main menu, choose Edit | Select All.

  • Press ⌘A.

Selecting with navigation keys

To select text from the current caret position to the beginning/end of the current word:

  • ⌥⇧←, ⌥⇧→.

To select text from the caret position to the beginning/end of the current line:

  • Double-click Ctrl and press Home/End

To select text from the current caret position to the top/bottom of the screen:

  • ⇧⌘⇞, ⇧⌘⇟.

Alternative ways to select code

To make selection of a column of text, do one of the following:

  • Keeping the Alt key pressed, drag your mouse pointer to select the desired area.

  • Keeping the middle mouse button pressed, drag your mouse pointer to select the desired area.

  • Press Alt+Shift and the middle mouse button. This is specially helpful, if you want to avoid dragging.

Extending selection

To extend selection from the caret position to the word it is at, and then to containing logical blocks of code, do one of the following:

  • Choose Edit | Extend Selection from the main menu.

  • Press ⌥↑ to select the word where the caret is currently located.

  • Press ⌥↑ successively to extend selection to the next containing node (for example, an expression, a paired tag, an entire conditional block, a method body, a class, a group of vararg arguments, etc.)

    While extending selection, keep in mind that:

    • Pressing ⌥↑ successively in plain text or comments extends the selection first to the current sentence, then to the current paragraph.

Shrinking selection

To shrink selection in the reverse order (from the outermost container to the word where the caret currently resides), do one of the following:

  • Choose Edit | Shrink Selection from the main menu.

  • Press ⌥↓.

Multiselection

AppCode supports selecting multiple text fragments. So doing, one can select multiple words, lines or rectangles.

To select multiple words, follow these steps

  1. Do one of the following:

    • Press Alt and double-click the words you want to select with the left mouse button.

      Multiselection
      Note that your initial caret position will be preserved and additionally, new carets will appear at the ends of selected words.

    • Press ⌃G, or select some text fragment. Then press ⌃G again, to find and select the case-sensitively matching word or piece of text. If you have started with selection, matching substrings will be selected consequently, otherwise matching words will be selected.

    • Set your caret at a word and press ⌃⌘G. All case-sensitively matching words in the document will be selected, the caret position will be the same as it were in the initial word.

  2. Check the selected fragments and caret positions. Note that if some global identifiers or their parts are selected, your edits can break the code.

  3. Do one of the following:

    • Use the arrow keys to adjust positions of the multiple carets and start typing. In this case, what you type will be added to existing

    • Start typing right away. In this case, all selected fragments will be replace with what you've typed.

To select multiple fragments of text, follow these steps

  1. Press Alt

  2. Drag the mouse pointer.

To select multiple rectangular fragments of text, follow these steps

  1. Press Cmd (Windows or UNIX)/ (macOS)

  2. Drag the mouse pointer.

Refer to the section Multicursor for additional information.

Toggling between line and column selection modes

To toggle between the line and the column selection modes, do one of the following:

  • From the main menu, choose Edit | Column Selection Mode.

  • From the context menu of the editor, choose Column Selection Mode.

  • Press ⇧⌘8.

Sticky selection

To toggle sticky selection, press ⇧⌘A, in the pop-up frame type sticky, and choose Toggle Sticky Selection from the suggestion list:

ac stickySelection

Tips and tricks

  • When sticky selection is on, you can turn it off by invoking copy or cut, or by toggling it again.

  • To create a large rectangular selection, create a normal selection first, with the given starting and ending points, and then press ⇧⌘8 to toggle to the column selection mode.

Last modified: 28 March 2019

See Also