Mouse clicking in "white space"

[Dswag89]

Once again, this post is born out of not knowing how to search it out in the community, so if this has been covered, I apologize!  I have a problem now with SE operation that I'm not used to.  I'm sure there's going to be a switch somewhere to give me back my former operation, but I need some help finding it!  Here's the problem:

I can no longer "click anywhere" in a file.  In days-gone-by, I could click way out in the 89th column (just picked a number) of a random line of a random C file and SE would place the cursor there.  This was extremely useful for grabbing a block from one file and pasting it into the "margin" of another file to pick-and-choose text from for building code.  With my current 12.0.2 SE (I think it has been this way since at least 12.0.0), I can no longer "click anywhere".  When I click beyond the end of a line in a file, the cursor goes to the end of the line.  So, if I click on the 89th column of a blank line, the cursor goes to column 1.

So my question is, how do I restore "click anywhere" functionality?

[hs2]

'Tools>Options>General: Click past end of line
HS2

[Dswag89]

SCHA-WEEET!  You da' man! Say, do you work somewhere, or just sit around and help folks with SE problems all day   You really should be on the payroll!

[hs2]

  - Just a quick answer while waiting for a lenghty build being finished ...
HS2

[jbhurst]

As well as the "click past end of line" option, you may be interested in trying a couple of settings (hidden away) in the "Redefine Common Keys" dialog (Tools > Options > Redefine Common Keys):

  - Cursor wrap
  - Up/Down on text

Disable both of these if you like to be able to move around part the ends of lines with the cursor keys.

John Hurst
Wellington, New Zealand

[Dswag89]

Thanks John, those are cool as well!

[StephenW]

There are now so many options that I have been in the same place Dswag89 has been several times now - searching for exactly the option to do something, and not being able to find it.  So I am thinking that maybe we now need a special help search function that searches just the options settings (and their associated help).  It should probably also include the less used settings that are only available as macro variables.  And it would need to be extensible for those of us who like to add things.

[Lisa]

There are now so many options that I have been in the same place Dswag89 has been several times now - searching for exactly the option to do something, and not being able to find it.  So I am thinking that maybe we now need a special help search function that searches just the options settings (and their associated help).  It should probably also include the less used settings that are only available as macro variables.  And it would need to be extensible for those of us who like to add things.

Making the Help extensible (as well as available online and more frequently) is one of our goals. We also want to separate the API documentation from the regular Help. I had NOT thought of separating the options as well. I like it! We'll look into this, Stephen...thanks for the idea!

[jbhurst]

Some IDEs (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse) now offer a special search facility in their configuration system. With IDEA for example, you open the main configuration panel, and it has a bunch of icons that open various configuration screens: General, Appearance, Editor, Code Completion, etc. There are 31 icons in my current version. It's sometimes hard to guess where a certain feature is configured.

So, you can type the feature name, e.g. "whitespace" into the search panel. Then the icons containing features relating to "whitespace" are highlighted. Also a menu appears with the specific settings relating to "whitespace" You can select from the menu and jump directly to the desired setting. It's a great way to make complex configuration a lot more user-friendly.

Regards

John Hurst
Wellington, New Zealand