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Block editing *live* in Emacs or Vim

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jEdit supports block editing, but Emacs and Vim seem to have some serious usability issues on the same subject. If someone could fill in the unknowns here it would be much more bearable to use either editor:

  • Actual rectangular selection: Where the selection on screen is a rectangle, not a linear selection which is then used to calculate a region as Emacs seems limited to.
    • jEdit: Hold down Ctrl and select.
    • Vim: Click Ctrl-v and select.
    • Emacs: Unknown; looks like a 400+ lines plugin is necessary.
  • Live rectangular editing: See what the result will look like on all lines as you edit after a block selection.
    • jEdit: Just start typing, and you'll see the end result as you go.
    • Vim: Click Shift-i and type. Will show the end result only on the first line until you press Esc to exit insert mode. Unknown whether there is some way to see the result on all lines immediately.
    • Emacs: Unknown; looks like the only way is C-x r t and setting the text to fill in after pressing Ret.
  • Start and end selection in positions outside the text: For example, I'd like to remove the N first characters of each line, but the first and last lines contain less than N characters.
  • Paste block inline: Paste the copied block as if you were pasting multiple lines, as in, push the text already there down, not right.
    • jEdit: The default. To paste a block as a block you need to do another block selection first.
    • Vim: OEscVp.
    • Emacs: Unknown.

General Emacs block selection functionality can be found in the cua-mode plugin.


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