#93: Option to lock the visual horizontal position of the caret upon moving vertically

Here's my opinion on cursor movement, and a suggestion for an improvement to TED Notepad. I define "good cursor behavior" like this: When you do an edit, then hit the "down-arrow" key, the cursor always stays in the same column. I define "bad cursor behavior" like this: When you do an edit, then hit the "down-arrow" key, the cursor changes to another column. The reason I call it "bad" behavior is that the cursor "walks" diagonally across the columns every time you hit the down-arrow, getting farther and farther from the original column. This never helps the user. When users are editing data that is arranged in columns, and they move to the next row, they usually want to stay in the same column.

I guess there are types of people, who'd benefit from this behaviour all the time; types of people, who'd like to use it from time to time, but will still prefer the old good default; and finally those, who'd go crazy if such a behaviour was the default. My first idea is to provide a hotkey command to lock current horizontal position. When this lock would be active, any keyboard-driven vertical movement would obey and return to that horizontal position. Unless you release the lock, you'd have keyboard-driven vertical movement fixed on that horizontal position. Any keyboard-driven horizontal movement would still preserve the lock. Any other movement (mouse, etc.) would automatically release the lock.