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Holding Option and clicking the button should performa column select

Caleb Land 12 aastat tagasi uuendatud 12 aastat tagasi 6
If I have a cursor, with no selection made, and I hold the option key and click somewhere else in the document, Sublime should column select from where the cursor was to where I clicked.
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No, it shouldn't, or at least it should be configurable. This behavior would rely on your cursor already being in one corner of your desired box selection, and to me it seems that in most cases this will lead to unexpected selection behavior and confusion.
Actually, this is the standard behaviour: Place your cursor somewhere, scroll somewhere else, click with shift pressed - this creates the same selection as if you selected by dragging. So alt-clicking would be the same: place your cursor somewhere, scroll somewhere else, click with alt pressed - same selection than dragging while having alt pressed.
With row-selection we have bare click vs shift+click; for the column selection you're suggesting that we should have alt+click vs alt+click for the two different selection modes? alt+shift+click for the "select to here" would be more agreeable.
You're completely right.

Still, Sublime Text doesn't do this. You can only column select by dragging your mouse, not by moving your cursor by clicking (with shift).

Sorry to bring this down to a pure feature comparison, but TextMate is a lot more flexible here, handling softwrapped lines more consistently, given quite good support in modifying your selection via mouse/keyboard and switching between column/normal selection mode. Just take it as an example of how that feature could work.
Oh yeah, option+shift+click would be better.
Whatever about the particular modifier-key, this is a useful addition for large (greater than a screen full) selections. You can currently extend-select using shift-click, extend-select-columnar would be nice. Should be achievable with a plug-in, if its not considered to fit the sublime selection style.