Because I never found it in 1.x either. Tapping ALT just never occurred to me. HOLDING ALT or some other control key often did things, but tapping was outside my limited box of tricks.

--Lewy

On Feb 14, 2012, at 2:03 AM, textmate-request@lists.macromates.com wrote:

...

On a stylistic note, I really would like "Change to Column Selection" to be put back into the Edit menu. It's not obvious (at least, not to me...) that tapping ALT is the way to do it, and it's not the kind of thing you can figure out by experimentation. I looked all over for how to make a column selection in TM2 and finally found it in a blog post.

While I won’t dispute the value of a menu item, why wouldn’t you assume that the way to do it in 1.x still worked (tapping the option key)? I assume your question about rebinding the key reveals that perhaps you never got into that in 1.x, hence the reason.