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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

What is the use of multiple cursors? Something that does not boil down to copy-paste programming.

UPDATE: From the answers below, I see that the point is the immediate visual feedback it gives.

The ability to use multiple cursors is one of Sublime Text's defining features, so describing an editor as being Sublime-like without that feature is somewhat of a letdown.

Find and replace on steroids, meaning the flexibility of moving the cursors around in all instances of a find and making edits near the beginnings and ends of lines, for example.

Not trying to diminish the use of multiple cursors (I have certain fondness for them despite not using them extensively due to my choice of editor), but using regexes you can still do that (i.e. with /^/ and /$/, which I use constantly with vim-style search and replace)

Pressing ctrl-d a couple of times, seeing what will change, and typing something is most of the time easier and faster than thinking about a regex. At least that's how I feel

Yep, I can see that being easier depending on what you prefer, I just wanted to point out that the feature wasn't unique to multiple cursors, since it was being described as "find and replace on steroids".

I'm one of those vim enthusiasts which installs vim keybinding in pretty much every editor i use and still agree.

Emacs' evil-mode provides "live" search-and-replace. I can't imagine using the vanilla Vim behavior any more.

I've been trying out spacemacs for the past few weeks, and I really love this feature as well

>Find and replace on steroids

For people who don't know regular expressions...

Or Vim macros.

I find that both have their uses.

That's a much better analogy. Multiple cursors have the same use cases as macros, they are just performed live instead of saved and replayed.

Yes, for most people.

That shouldn't be coding or should invest some hours for learning regexes...

Try doing this with regular expressions.

https://gifs.com/player/G6m3vQ

Similar use to reg ex based find and replace but with less thought needed. Useful for those that prefer just editing rather than composing regular expressions.

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