Column-mode in editors comes from ancient history.
The BRIEF editor for MS-DOS, intended to be a "Programmer's Editor", some time before 1990, already included column mode and many other features that few editors have today.
Re:Sublime Text 4
by LegionMammal978 on Friday May 21, 2021 @11:31AM
(#27235339)
I've been using ST3 for the past few years, and I have a go-to keyboard sequence for a column mode equivalent: Select the entire block, press Ctrl+Shift+L to split the selection into individual lines, press Home to create a cursor at the start of each line, and use the right arrow to navigate the cursor to the desired column. (You can also edit the end of each line by pressing End, move by entire words with Ctrl+Left or Right, and so on.)
FWIW Sublime Text do have "multi cursor editing" mode that can do some basic column mode editing.
Add to that vi keybindings to ST, and you can get better and faster "column mode-like" editing.
VS Code has column mode
What is column mode?
I love it in general, but in particular there's one feature that I can't do without: column mode. I don't understand why other editors haven't copied it (at least to my knowledge. If you know any other that has it, I'd like to know). For those of us that often work with CSV-like formats, it's a real time saver.
It's also better behaved for huge files than any other editor I've tried.