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.
That shouldn't be coding or should invest some hours for learning regexes...
Or Vim macros.
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.
I find that both have their uses.
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".
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
I'm one of those vim enthusiasts which installs vim keybinding in pretty much every editor i use and still agree.