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I've read that WordStar had a "column mode" which could be useful for making it act as a programmer's editor. But I've not found a clear description (or screenshots) of exactly what this mode was and what it did?

Note - I'm not even sure if that is the real name of the feature, or just a description.

Took me a while to write this and another answer showed up. But submitting it anyway because I am such a huge fan of WordStar and have the keystrokes in muscle memory.

There are a few different features of WordStar that made it work pretty well (for the time) as a programmer's editor. I used it (and NewWord) for many years, and then switched to vEdit. I have programmed vEdit with the WordStar control-codes and used it that way for so many years that it is somewhat of a blur which features were actually native in WordStar/NewWord and which ones were not. (Well, multi-gigabyte file editing is definitely vEdit and not WordStar...)

Non-document Mode

Non-document mode was a key feature of WordStar that most other word processors never had. In non-document mode, there were no formatting codes inserted or recognized (e.g., for bold, italics, etc.), did not wrap lines automatically, and did not set the 8th-bit of characters for internal use. A quick search finds WordStar's Document and Non-Document Modes Demystified which gives a complete explanation.

Column Blocks

I think this is the feature you are referring to. I still use it today in vEdit, which as a programmer's editor quite naturally has such a feature, but I still use the WordStar codes to get to it. WordStar historically used Ctrl-KB to start a block and Ctrl-KK to end a block. Those keys worked very much like clicking on the start of a block in a typical modern word processor and holding shift while clicking on the end - block highlighted and ready to copy/move/delete.

However, if you pressed Ctrl-KN first, then you entered column block mode. In this mode the block is a rectangle instead of a continuous character stream. This is ideal for programming as you can use it to indent/undent, move chunks of data or code around left & right, etc.

WordStar does indeed have a column mode, whose effect is to allow blocks to have left and right boundaries. Usually when you mark a block (using CtrlKB and CtrlKK), the block spans whole lines, with at most the first and last lines being incomplete. In column mode (CtrlKN), the block starts at whatever line and column the cursor is in when you start it, and ends at whatever line and column the cursor is in when you end it. You can then manipulate the column as an object.

For example, this would allow you to select the “Year” column below

Year Top salesman Total sales
2013 Joe Bloggs 1000000
2014 Jane Doe 1500000

and move it to another position in the table.

When programming, this is useful for indenting or un-indenting code, or manipulating columnar data as would be common in some programming environments in the past.

Using WordStar has a decent description of this feature.

(For readers used to modern-day column handling in word processors, this has nothing to do with page layout columns. It’s a text-selection feature which you’ll find in many text editors; see for example editors with support for rectangular block selection in Wikipedia’s comparison of text editors.)

Well, since I mentioned it, I'll illustrate it. I'm told that this is not unique to WordStar: Borland Sprint had it, and so do several modern text editors (I've been using Emacs with folds for the last 25 years).

Say you have some text like this:

 Production by year
 Foos Bars Blats Spungs
1975 4 7 20 3
1976 1000 2 23 1
1977 3000 1 1537 0
1978 5000 4 20331 0
1979 4875 321 38145 0
1980 4900 450 37 0

This is not using a column formatting feature like a modern word processor. These are just characters on simple lines of text, in a text file. They are necessarily monospaced text, because CP/M, which WordStar was designed for, had no graphics.

Now, you want to change the order of the columns, in this text file. It's a fiddle. However, if you have column mode, you can select, say, the Bars column, which looks like this on the screen:

 Production by year
 Foos *Bars* Blats Spungs
1975 4 * 7* 20 3
1976 1000 * 2* 23 1
1977 3000 * 1* 1537 0
1978 5000 * 4* 20331 0
1979 4875 * 321* 38145 0
1980 4900 * 450* 37 0

Then you put the cursor at the start of the Spungs column, and use the Block Move command (not separate cut and paste commands, they hadn't been invented yet), and you get this:

 Production by year
 Foos Blats Bars Spungs
1975 4 20 7 3
1976 1000 23 2 1
1977 3000 1537 1 0
1978 5000 20331 4 0
1979 4875 38145 321 0
1980 4900 37 450 0

Yes, this is far more primitive than you might do with a modern text-processing tool, or with spreadsheet columns embedded in a word-processor document. Retrocomputing, remember?