Re: Rectangular regions

[Josh]

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 13:02:12 -0700
>> From: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>
>> CC: address@hidden
>>
>> On 11/01/2013 12:59 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> >> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
>> >> Cc: address@hidden
>> >> Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 15:55:45 -0400
>> >>
>> >> But there can be good reasons to use rectangle operations in programming
>> >> modes as well
>> >
>> > I'm surprised: could you give an idea why that could be useful?
>>
>> I've used them to deal with ASCII art diagrams.
>
> In a program source?  If so, it must have been in comments, where you
> would never set a breakpoint, right?

I also use rectangle commands in programming modes from time to
time, and not in comments.  For example, I can often perform
simultaneous edits to common substrings of columnar data such as
enum elements far more efficiently with a rectangle command than I
could using a keyboard macro or replace-regexp.  I also use
rectangle commands quite often when when transforming extracts from
log files into a form suitable for programmatic use.