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Comment by sambeau | Hacker News Reader

My main wish for VS Code is 'proper' multiple cursors (where by 'proper' I mean 'works the way I expect' which is the Sublime Text way).

I fully understand that if you come from a world of 2D blocks (or regions) where you can select rectangles then VS Code's way of doing things makes sense but I am so used to having multiple identical cursors and being able to swipe vertical lines through tables of text or more often down the ragged right hand side that I find VS Code frustrating for hard-core text editing.

I seem to start every new project using it and I love its language-specific coding tools (and how it handles extensions) but as soon as I need to do a large edit on a nasty piece of text I find myself switching back to Sublime.

(I will of course give it another go as soon as I start another new project)

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shift+alt click seems to behave just like sublime does, I left sublime a long time ago, I'm not sure what you're trying to describe there?

Do you mean because it selects the rectangle? Just hit an arrow key.

Right- or ‘end’ to get cursors onto the end of every line

Last I tried you couldn't scrape down the right side of the ragged edge. I'll try it out again as maybe it's fixed.

I also found the 'extra' cursors too faint previously. Hopefully that's been improved too.

I'll give it a go as there's so much to like about it.

I've tried it and there is still a problem: the cursors draw from wherever the previous cursor was. This makes it impossible to draw a line of cursors vertically through your text without first placing a single cursor at either the top of the bottom of where you want to draw the line. So instead of click-drag (with a modifier key) you have to click-click-drag (with a modifier key).

I do find the click-click drag annoying too.

I've also tried to put cursors along a ragged right edge and that doesn't work as it tries to create a rectangular selection. It looks like its worked but as soon as you hit a cursor key the cursors try to line up and you end up with cursors at odd positions. Very odd.

Ah I see what you mean.

I wouldn't call that a problem per-se. It draws a cursor where there it text to draw one. This makes sense to me as I can edit a column of values and not pick up already empty columns.

To do what you want I'd just multi-cursor the start of all the lines and hit end. Usually ctrl+arrow over word boundaries gets anywhere I need after that.

Anything fancier still I've just written a regex instead.

Could certainly be a preference option to enable blank lines on multiple cursors. it would have to fill the white space.

Hi, I'm a VS Code developer.

Can you please open a new issue and describe "as you would to a five year old" what's not working as expected.

Even from reading this comment thread I simply don't get it, so it might be something very easy to fix, once I do understand what it's about.

Thank you for your patience! :)

Whoop! Would love to—thanks for your time :)

I haven't used Sublime in years now, but that was one huge feature I think about and miss often when in VSCode. I'm glad VSCode does have the current implementation of multiple cursors, and the way Sublime did it differently is subtle, but man it makes a huge difference!

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