Block marking / Text highlighting
Contents
Several very useful operations can be performed on marked blocks (or selected text).
See the following sections for further details:
Blocks can be marked in several ways:
Using the Keyboard
Click here for further details.
Mark with mouse
A block may be marked in the usual method of holding down the left mouse button and dragging it over the text to be selected, releasing the button when the required text has been highlighted.
Specifying the start and end positions
This method is useful when marking very large blocks, or in hex mode, when you want to mark a specific address range.
To mark the start of a block, simply right-click on the corresponding character (or hex bytes) and select Mark Block->Start Point. To select the end of the block, scroll to the appropriate position in the file, right click on the corresponding character and select Mark Block->End Point. Once the start and end points have been specified, V will highlight the appropriate area.
Note that the end of the block may be marked before the start. Also, once a block is marked, it may be modified by choosing a new start or end point.
V will draw a marker around the start (or end) of a character to indicate the start (or end) marker. This marker will remain visible until it is cleared (by right-clicking and selecting Mark Block->Clear) or moved (by selecting a different position).
Note that the color of the marker may be specified by selecting Change Colors from the View menu.
Marking to End or Start
This method is similar to the above, except you only need to specify one point in the file (by right clicking at the appropriate location). The second point will either be the end or the start of the file. To mark a block from a character position to the end of the file, right click on that character position and select Mark Block->To End. Similarly, to mark a block from the start of the file to a character position, right-click on the end character position and select Mark Block->To Start.
Offset from current position
You may mark an exact number of characters from a file position by right-clicking on the file position, choosing Mark Block->Plus Offset (or Minus Offset) and then specifying the number of characters to mark.
Marking the entire file
The entire file may be marked by selecting Select Block->Entire File from the Edit menu, or by right-clicking and selecting Mark Block->Entire File. The entire file may also be selected by pressing Ctrl-A.
Selecting a word or line
To highlight an entire word, simply double-click anywhere on the word. Usually, only alphanumeric characters and the underscore are used to determine what constitutes a word. To use a more extended character set to select a word, press the shift key while you double-click. For example, double-clicking at the start of "http://www.fileviewer.com/" will only highlight "http". However, by also pressing the shift key, the entire URL is highlighted. Click here for further details on how to customize this behaviour.
To select the entire line, simply press the control key while you double click anywhere on the line.
If you double-click on a word (to select it) and then move the mouse before releasing the left mouse button (to select further text), V will always end the selection at the end of a word.
Extending the selected text
Once text has been selected, it can be extended (or shortened) by shift-clicking on the new end (or start) position. That is, click on the new end position while the shift key is pressed.
Marking Columns
Click here for details on how to select text in a particular column range.
Notes
•Pressing Ctrl+F3 will search for the next occurrence of any highlighted text.
•When HEX data is highlighted, both the Hex and Character views of the file are highlighted.
•Clicking the left mouse button on any part of the file view will clear any marked block (but it will not clear any block marker).