Want to select that list of genes without the pain of closing and reopening the file in Excel? Diana Higgins at Windows Fanatics reminds us to do this using most text editors (it can also be done in Word). Simply hold down the Alt key (or the option key in Macs) when making a selection.
Unfortunately this little trick doesn’t work in Microsoft’s notepad and I wasn’t able to find such a key in Gnome for Linux either. Does anyone else out there know?
I can add a small tip. In editplus (at least in windows) the same can be done with Alt+C.
Hi! In Vim you can use the Ctrl-v combination and then HJKL (or arrow) keys to adjust your selection.
Alt-mouse drag will select columns in TextPad
In linux you can feed awk the output you want to select from and have it output only the column you want..
e.g. if you want the second column you use awk like this:
$ SOMECOMMAND | awk ‘{print $2}’
This will only print the second column of a space/tab separated output
Tal – thanks for that command line tip!
Notepad does this very well too. You can make a vertical selection and then type on every line which is selected.