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Comment by melloclello | Hacker News Reader

All I want, in any text editor, is multiple cursors [1]. It's a really powerful concept that renders a large number of otherwise tedious operations tractable without having to resort to macros or other nonintuitive abstractions.

I feel like it's such a useful feature that it should be baked into your operating system's text field widgets from the ground up. It's intuitive enough, too, that regular users could probably grasp it.

[1] As per Sublime Text: http://www.sublimetext.com

While I'm here I'd like to gripe that while there is a third party Atom package which adds support for multiple cursors [2], it has a number of bugs in it which seem to be irresolvable due to some deep architectural issue with Atom. ARGH.

[2] Sublime-Style-Column-Selection is the only package that attempts to do it "properly": https://atom.io/packages/sublime-style-column-selection

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When I remember to use multiple cursors (in emacs), they work really well, but also seem kind of gimmicky. Anything you can do with multiple cursors (at least as they exist in Sublime Text and emacs multiple-cursors-mode) you can also do in emacs with a keyboard macro, and I got into the habit of using keyboard macros a long, long time ago.

In emacs, there's also iedit-mode, which is another way of doing the same sort of things you would do with multiple cursors.

It's not a simple text editor but Jetbrains editors fully support this and I LOVE it! Agree with you 100% that it should be in everything.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.1/multicursor.html

I love the Jetbrains editor, I just wish I could open random files in it, without it trying to organize them into "projects" or whatever.

You can open random files with it. From the command line, type `idea <filepath>`. If you already have a project open, the file will open in the same window as that project, but it isn't tracked as part of the project. If you don't have IntelliJ open yet, it starts a new instance with just that file.

That being said, even though I'm more comfortable with Jetbrains' editors, I still tend to edit miscellaneous docs in atom or vim.

What do you actually use multi-cursor for in typical coding? I tried it out when it was introduced in IntelliJ. I thought it was cool, but I've not run into any uses for it in the years since.

refactoring (select a variable name, select all instances of that name, change), and also 1 time pre-processing data

That makes sense. I use RubyMine's refactoring to rename all instances of a variable, but if that weren't available multi-cursor would certainly be a lot easier than copy-pasting.

> refactoring (select a variable name, select all instances of that name, change),

regex works great for me in vim

> 1 time pre-processing data

I use regex for this most of the time, and macros if it's more complicated. I think macros are actually quite a bit more powerful than multiple cursors because you can apply the same set of transformations between files (and without needing to match against a particular word or pattern).

Obligatory emacs: http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html.

Now that I'm used to keyboard navigation this seems so backwards

I navigate almost exclusively by keyboard and I use multiple cursors in Sublime Text constantly. Maybe a better term for it would be "multiple carets".

Is multiple cursors like setting marks in vi?

Maybe. You can get multiple cursors in Vi(m) too. Essentially it's just an interactive way of applying a particular set of commands in more than one place in a file. Personally I've never actually used it and not regretted writing a regex to do it instead.

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