eclipse plugin for rectangular select/cut/paste regions?

Question

Does anyone know of an Eclipse plugin to do selection by rectangular region rather than the "normal" selection? (difference illustrated below)

 the asterisks here represent a "normal" selection region *****
 ************
 ******************
 ***** and can all be selected as one block of text

 here is a ************* rectangular
 selection ************* region
 that I wo ************* uld like to be able 
 to select and delete

Answer 1

Edit: Eclipse 3.5 has this built-in, so a plugin is now unnecessary.

Textual editors now support block (aka column or rectangular) selection mode:

To enable it either use Alt+Shift+A or activate the 'Editor Presentation' action set to get a tool bar button for toggling the block selection mode.

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For Eclipse 3.4 and earlier, try columns4eclipse:

Columns Plug-in for Eclipse defines the concept of 'Column' and some functions of this editable component. Functions such as copy, paste, cut, fill, lowercase, uppercase, search and replace, columns history and others are provided.

or column_mode:

There have been various attempts to fix this by simply adding a plug-in on top of eclipse, most notably columns4eclipse. However, these solutions do not offer the full functionality one expects when coming from editors such as UltraEdit.

In January 2007, Avaloq has sponsored the creation of a patch that implements column mode natively in eclipse. Due to the invasive nature of the patch and the fact that the API freeze for Eclipse 3.3 was already approaching, the patch could not be looked at closely. This site's purpose is to make a patched version of the required plug-ins available, in order to make it easy for interested parties to play with the provided functionality.

July 2008 – Chances that the patch will ever make it into the Eclipse trunk are rather small. By popular request, I have adapted the patch to Eclipse 3.4 and created an update site containing feature patches for the affected features in the Eclipse SDK. This should work for most text editors.

Answer 2

In OSX running Eclipse3.7, block quote is toggle via option + command + a