I'm transitioning from UltraEdit on Windows to gedit on Linux. So far, the experience is great (there's a lot here for a free tool), but there's one indispensable feature of UltraEdit I can't seem to find a way to replicate -- Column Mode.
Column Mode is a feature available in UltraEdit by pressing Alt+C. With it enabled you can highlight text in a single column over many lines, allowing you to edit many lines at once (e.g., to comment out a section of text, prepend some string to aligned variable names, or for many other reasons). It's saved me countless hours of find-and-replace or repetitive manual editing of consecutive lines, and I feel very awkward in gedit without it.
Is there anything like this (via a plugin probably) in gedit?