I find column mode in the editor extremely useful, but it's usefulness is limited by having to explicitly turn it on or off for a period of time. I would love for it to behave in a way similar to TextWrangler and even more so like TextMate on the Mac. In these applications you can hold down the option key while selecting text with the mouse and it engages column mode for the duration of the selection. You can region/column select text, delete, type etc. When you hit any navigation key, or perform a new selection, column-mode is dis-engaged.

For extra credit, TextMate even allows you to perform a regular selection using the keyboard (shift-arrows) and then tap the option key to turn it into the equivelant column mode selection. It's very cool, and is one of the reasons I occasionally drop out of IntelliJ and edit files in one of these editors.