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Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

imo, Multiline cursors are one of these features that look and feel cool, but are rarely, if ever, really useful.

That's shocking to me. Ctrl-D in visual studio code and alt-J in jetbrains are some of my most used key combinations. Even alt-click in visual studio code is sometimes extremely useful. It's like the ability to record and play back a macro multiple times, except you do it interactively and can see / fix / add things as you go.

I use it daily and find it immensely useful.

That's also what I thought as a Vim user before I had access to Kakoune's multiline editing. It changed my mind and might change yours too if you give it a chance

Ditto. I rarely use multiple cursors in other editors, but I use them _constantly_ in Kakoune. I have been using it for multiple years. The composability of the command language is what makes it shine.

I used editors with multiline editing capabilities in the past.

There are only 2 usecases where it was of any value to me: If I have to write multiple lines in a similar fashion, or if I have to edit the same thing in a similar fashion in several places at once.

Both can be done much easier by using a regular expression.

I disagree. In the past I've used regex to do that and now that I have access to a multicursor, I won't be going back. I think with regex you don't get the same kind of visual feedback that you get from a multicursor which is why I (and many other Kakoune users as well) like it so much. If you're happier with regex and feel like you don't need multicursor, that's great.

In case it helps anyone, doing regex-based search/edit in vim was annoying until I found this plugin. https://github.com/haya14busa/incsearch.vim

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