MultiLine Text Selection

Do you ever find yourself reading something on a website, selecting a piece of text, and then instinctively pressing Ctrl so you can non-continuously select another piece of text? If this works for you, then you’re probably using Mozilla Firefox, the only browser capable of the non-continuous multiple text selection.

Unfortunately, Google Chrome users know by now that such a feature isn’t available in the browser’s default settings. But now it can be, through an extension called MultiLine Text Selection.

Once you install the add-on, it will enable you to use the Ctrl key to select multiple pieces of separated text, just like you would in Firefox or in a more complex word processor. Then you can, of course, copy the text, but MultiLine Text Selection gives you even more options.

If you open the extension’s drop-down menu, you’ll see three buttons: Copy With Newlines, Copy With Spaces and Copy With Bullets. These don’t exactly tell the add-on how to copy the selected pieces of text, but rather how to paste them. With the first option selected, the text items will be pasted on separate lines each. If you select the second option, the items will be pasted on the same line, with spaces between them, while the third option will paste them as a list with bullets.

With MultiLine Text Selection you can even make Google searches for multiple words and phrases. The extension offers you two ways to do it; the first is called MultiSearch and will open a new search tab for every selected item, while the second option is called CombinedSearch and will open one single search tab for all the selected pieces of text. You can access both of these options from the context menu, after making a selection.

It’s obvious that the developer really thought of everything when creating this tool. If you use Google Chrome to do a lot of research and writing, then you’ll find MultiLine Text Selection a really useful extension.