I'm transitioning from UltraEdit on Windows to gedit on Linux. So far, the experience is great (there's a lot here for a free tool), but there's one indispensable feature of UltraEdit I can't seem to find a way to replicate -- Column Mode.
Column Mode is a feature available in UltraEdit by pressing Alt+C. With it enabled you can highlight text in a single column over many lines, allowing you to edit many lines at once (e.g., to comment out a section of text, prepend some string to aligned variable names, or for many other reasons). It's saved me countless hours of find-and-replace or repetitive manual editing of consecutive lines, and I feel very awkward in gedit without it.
Is there anything like this (via a plugin probably) in gedit?
Answer
I'm not sure if this helps. The GNOME page on the subject is down. Quite a lot of people seem to be looking for that exact feature. One guy is doing this plug-in; try it perhaps it helps: http://jon-walsh.com/journal/multi-edit/
Other thoughts on the subject are here: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17656/. This is supposed to be an unfinished plug-in for what you're looking for, but as I said, the page appears to be down. http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins/ColumnMode