Many years ago I used a feature in an editor that allowed me to quickly expand a selection from the beginning of a paragraph to a given character. I can't remember whether it was MS Word for DOS or another retro editor or word processor :). (If I remember correctly, the feature was triggered by the forward slash.)
Since CafeTran Espresso doesn't offer a quick selection feature (yet), I decided to create a macro that allows me to quickly select the beginning of a target segment up to a given character. Once the selection exists, I can make all kinds of modifications (deletion, change to lowercase, cut etc.).