Highlighting rectangles?

[Pavel Janík]

Hi,

one of my friends (TeXpert) who recently migrated to Emacs from CRISP
really value features of Emacs. He rewrote almost all of his customisation
to Lisp. There is only one thing at the moment I do not know how to do
properly with Emacs. Highlighting rectangle regions. He uses transient mark
mode by default and find its highlighting confusing (consider different
effects of C-x r d vs. C-w).

It is obvious, that it is not as easy as it seems, because he must first
decide, what should be highlighted (region/rectangle). What should be done
here? Do we miss something like that?

Sometimes, I use an editor joe which has two modes for blocks - text stream
mode and rectangle mode. User can mark "region" which is then highlighted
and then choose rectangle mode and the rectangle is highlighted. How to do
that in Emacs?

Hmm, but maybe I have not read the manual precisely yet ;-)
-- 
Pavel Janík

So calm down guys. And improving the benchmark might not be a bad idea.
                  -- Linus Torvalds in linux-kernel