Editor selection improvement

Good afternoon!

First I should thank everyone who made and makes NetBeans IDE growing. 
It's very useful IDE, I really like it.


About Editor improvement. It's about a text-selection feature. I thought 
about this feature a lot of times and needed it very much. I hope that 
I'm not alone.

What do I mean? It should be the file(ANY file, not just java or xml) 
editor feature. We all know that we can select few lines of code and 
delete/copy/paste it. But often it could be very useful if we can select 
COLUMNS instead of rows(lines). For example, assume this simple code:

*Code:*
 this.a1 = b1;
 this.a2 = b2;
 this.a3 = b3;
 this.a4 = b4;
etc...


And we need to add "this." to all b-variables. Logically it would be 
nice to copy it from a-variables. But practically - without rectangular 
selection it's impossible.

Just for example - such ability has Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, and I 
should admit that they did it very simple and intuitive to use. It's 
just like ordinary selection, just you should keep pressed the "Alt" 
button. After text is selected - every button like "Del", "Ctrl+Ins", 
etc. works like if it was the ordinary selection.
NetBeans IDE has it too, BUT as a plugin(rectangular selection), and I 
should mention that the plugin is VERY hard to use. MS approach is a lot 
easier and much more useful.


If this editor feature be in MyEclipse - it would be VERY useful.
Please, tell if it's possible to add this feature in NetBeans.


Thank you very much in advance!


_______________________
Regards,
J-Pro