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Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

Vim supports multiline editing and I'd imagine emacs does as well. In bash/zsh, <ctrl-x ctrl-e> opens up $EDITOR so you can use whatever you're accustomed to anyhow.

Most of these features are already available if one spends a bit of time configuring their terminal/shell.

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Is multiline editing popular/useful? Thus far, the only occasions I've seen it shown is when someone is demonstrating it.

I'd say so, I find myself using it somewhat regularly.

It's pretty easy in vim once you learn how to use visual block mode. That or using Sed to replace text in a selection or the entire file.

http://paulrougieux.github.io/vim.html#Edit_multiple_lines

I use it not infrequently for crafting big ol bash pipelines to put into scripts, specifically via emacs’ `shell` terminal emulator.

I use the visual-multi plugin [0] all day in vim/neovim.

I don't like using tons of plugins but multi cursor with with selective invocation like the ctrl-d of sublime etc was the main thing I missed when moving to vim. (I use visual block mode too but it's not the same thing).

https://github.com/mg979/vim-visual-multi.git

If you need to pass lots of arguments to a command it's super useful. Typically I don't do this because it's quite unwieldly with a standard readline editor, but I could if multiline editing was available!

Put `set -o vi` in your .bashrc

That's all you need - you don't need a whole program that collects all of your information.

They are very useful! As a long time Vim user who switched to Kakoune[0] a while back, I didn't even realize I needed a good multiline cursor from my editor before it tried Kakoune. Highly recommend it!

[0] https://kakoune.org/

Thank you for sharing this tip ^_^

While this can be done in zsh/bash, it takes investment to understand how to use multiline specifically. And then once you leave the terminal, the same keystroke does not do anything for you.

One of Warp is that you don't have to think twice about it because it behaves similarly to text fields everywhere else on your computer.

In the terminal, I often have the feeling that personal computing revolution from Xerox PARC & Apple Computer never happened.

This works in everything that uses libreadline to accept user input (unless the binary has specifically configured library differently iiuc), so should work in all shell-like interfaces. You can customize the shortcuts in inputrc, likewise, for all libreadline-using binaries. By default, readline tries to be emacs-like. You can ask it to be vi-like, or reconfigure lots of its shortcuts to be similar to an editor you like. To be fair, "escape to real editor" is not a thing you usually do in an editor, so that will remain special.

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