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.