One of the workflows I used in vi/m over last 2 decades is : vertical selection and edit

So much so that it is part of my muscle memory and I needed to learn the equivalent in helix.

After some searching, I found it. Here are the steps:

• Go to the column you want to select. Press v to enter select mode.
• Select the column and to go down and up in the column selection use Shift-C or Alt-Shift-C
• You can repeat the Shift-c command using the numeric operator if needed, like 10-Shift-C to select the column 10 rows vertically.
• Now you can perform any action on the selection e.g.
  • Go to insert mode and add * before each column.
  • Or d to delete the selected letter from all the rows (in normal) mode.
• You can come out of this (multi-select?) mode via , in normal mode (If you are in insert mode, finish editing and come back to normal mode first, via Esc)

Source