Rectangular Blocks

Normally blocks are thought of sequentially from their first to last characters. It is also possible to mark rectangular blocks, the block marks being thought of as the opposite corners of the rectangle.

The commands which operate on blocks automatically check whether the current block is a rectangle; if so they change their function accordingly. For example, the Ctrl-i command (insert-block) understands that rectangular blocks have to be inserted in a different manner to normal, sequential, blocks.

Ctrl-M

Toggle between marking sequential and rectangular blocks, each window has its own value of this attribute (i.e. one window can be marking rectangles while the rest don't).

Ctrl-Y

Similar to Ctrl-y except that the string inserted is treated as a rectangle -- newline characters don't get inserted, instead the next line is inserted in the next line in the buffer at the same column as that inserted into the previous line. For more details see the function insert-rect.

At present there is a problem with changing the case of a rectangular block with Ctrl-x Ctrl-l or Ctrl-x Ctrl-u, they treat it as a sequential block. This will be fixed soon.

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