@elextr if it's a matter of counting columns it should be doable as Scintilla 
gives the column info, it's then a matter of counting how many columns are 
selected.

However, I'm not sure it makes much sense to count this, as some "characters" 
take up more than one column -- the most obvious one being the tab character, 
which even takes a variable amount of columns, but there are others. Counting 
code points might be slightly better, or rather whatever Scintilla counts as 
"stops", e.g. "*the number of positions the caret can be at*" (and this should 
be fairly easy to count, although probably in a fairly expansive way).  Or even 
the number of actually composited characters.  Meh, displaying symbols is so 
complicated.
My preference would probably go to counting the code points, regardless of 
their composition because that's the number of "items" stored in the file, and 
that's often more interesting to know in a programming context than actual 
rendered characters on screen; but all these informations (bytes, code points, 
columns, composited characters) are useful in some situations and not in others.

One fairly important information to take into account here is that Geany uses 
UTF-8 internally, but that does not have to be the file's encoding.  This means 
that the byte count in Geany does not necessarily makes sense in the target 
encoding -- and suggests the current info is kind of irrelevant, yet is often 
useful as well.

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