Visual select single column from cursor to last line with text in column

Question

There are already a lot of similar questions to this.

• Jump to last line, but stay in the same column
• How to go to the end of the file in vim while preserving the current column under the cursor?
• How do you select a whole column in visual block mode?

They all end with toggling the startofline setting. Using startofline it's possible to start a visual selection with Ctrl-v and then use gg or G to select entire columns of text from the cursor to the beginning or to the end of the file. What if I want to select an entire column that doesn't go to the beginning or end of the file?

So for this text:

first line

x b c
a m w
q y c
a e z

last line

If the cursor was on b in the line reading x b c, how can I select the column starting at that b and ending on the e in a e z?

For non-column oriented actions similar to this I would use the shift paren/bracket family but they seem unaffected by nostartofline.

Answer 1

Probably the simplest way to solve this (apart from using something like ctrl-v 4j) is to use the textojb-word-column plugin: if cursor is placed on the "right" column, a simple vic will get the job done. This is the demo from the plugin page: