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Completely agree on the awesomeness of multiple cursors and ST2 in general. The official documentation has some more tips: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/multiple_selection_with_th...

Fortunately, other editors are already adopting similar features. Just today I was fiddling around with Ace, a web-based code editor, and noticed that they support multiple cursors too! Just select multiple words while pressing the Ctrl (or Cmd) key.

Live demo: http://ace.ajax.org/build/kitchen-sink.html

The nicest thing is that I only found this by accident because I'm so used to using multiple cursors in ST2. It's a great feeling to be surprised that something works just the way you sub-conciously expected :)

Fortunately, other editors are already adopting similar features.

Yup, work's being done to add this to Emacs as well although it is not quite there yet:

- http://emacsrocks.com/e08.html

- https://github.com/emacsmirror/multiple-cursors

This is awesome. The world is finally waking up! :)

Are you saying Emacs is finally getting a decent editor? ;)

I guess you are aware Sublime Text 2 has a Vim mode. As someone who's gone "far in Vim's world", how do you think this compares to regular Vim? I'm starting to learn Vim commands in ST2 but I don't know if "proper" Vim is required to get fully into Vim.

I'll be brutally honest. I think it's a great effort, and almost moved back to Sublime Text w Vintage mode several times. And each time, I'll run a command that Vintage mode doesn't have yet, and leave.

I'd love it if ST managed to replace vim. I (very unfortunately!) don't see it happening soon. Vim just has so many features and so many plugins.

NOTE: Half of my plugins in Vim are only there to make vim behave like a decent, modern editor. In fact, half of my plugins in Vim are there to make it behave more like Sublime Text.

I think it's one of the best vim-emulations I've seen so far. It's not 100% but it has things like text-objects (cit, etc.), named buffers and bookmarks (which most of the other emulations miss).

One thing I miss in ST2 Vintage mode is that <> brackets aren't recognized with things like ci< and di<.

I do V(motion):norm cityour new content<CR>, which does the same as your point 2, very often.

But, as you said, multiple cursors is a lot like visual feedback for macros. I miss such a "live" feel sometimes.

You got me interested: I'm looking forward for your Vim plugin.

I agree multiple cursors are awesome and largely can replace macros with real-time visible changes.

But there is one use-case of macros that cannot be replaced with multiple cursors -- one where the places being affected by the macro are themselves computed by the macro.

Can you please give an example of that? You've got my curiosity piqued :)

Btw, another place this can't be used is across multiple files, at least the way ST does it.

Sample

    def qux(bar, baz, qux)
        pass

    def quuux(grim, gram, grom)
        pass

    def quuuuuux(hip, hop, zoom)
        pass

Delete second argument (of 3+ arg functions):

    /def<CR> # search
    qd       # record as 'd'
    2f,dF,n  # find second arg
    q        # done recording
   
    @d       # again (or n to skip)

Example intentionally simplified/convoluted. I'm doing stuff like this on the spot routinely, and there's no way multiple cursors could do this because I apply verbs to text objects that ST has (unless I'm missing something) no way of knowing about in a visual paradigm without resorting to guessing what I mean.

What would be killer is mixing both, i.e visually selecting where to apply a vim macro.

Actually, this is a perfect example of using Multiple Cursors to get the job done more easily.

I'd select all three "def"s simultaneously, then move by word three/four times using ctrl+right, or plain old "w" if using ST's vim mode. When I'm on the second param, I'll delete forward to the next ",". I could also just ctrl+right my way until the next word, which would be the same.

Just to recap the keys I'd press:

/def (select first def) ctrl+d * 2 (select using multi-cursors the next two defs ctrl+right * 4 (to get to the second param) ctrl+shift+right (to select the entire second param) delete

And if I mess up at any point, I instantly see it. If I did something that only works for the first case but not the others, I see it immediately.

Note: Using vintage mode, Sublime Text has vim shortcuts. Without it, Multiple Cursors still rock, but are missing a LOT of their power (exactly because of situations like this).

In fact, in Sublime Text 1, for which vim mode didn't exist, I actually implemented a plugin to emulate the "f" and "t" movements because they were so good.

> When I'm on the second param, I'll delete forward to the next ","

you can't do that, else you'll delete not enough ('gra') or too much ('baz,')

> ctrl+shift+right

It fails the moment one of the second arguments has a space or a dash. e.g default value:

    def qux(bar, baz = {}, qux)

or in some languages (CSS, HTML, LISP)

    <div class="foo bar-baz quux" data-behavior>

The interesting reason is why it fails: you say you want to delete 'to the next ","' but do word movement with w or ctrl+arrows. Indeed this is solved by Vintage mode, but I unfortunately found it too inconsistent with vim, and lacking a few critical features (e.g vim-surround and indent-object) for me.

Also, multiple cursors rock anyway, but if I want to apply them to a number of elements responding to a criteria and decide on a case by case basis if I want to apply then it does not work. Also it does not work when there's no code locality (i.e affected code is not visible in the same view, or spread around multiple files). The major difference with macros is that they're repeatable, while multiple cursors do the same thing at once, and once.

Also, when one vim user uses f/t too often, one should look into an object describing what he wants to really do (here [0]).

[0] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2699

I hope Sublime Text has or introduces at some point the same extendable concept of text objects as in vim.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything of this is bad per se, just that there's room for improvement.

How do you make multiple cursors that are at the exact locations you need?

That's something that a macro is useful for. His macro is less useful because for some reason he did his search outside of the macro. Maybe the search is not for "def", but for "def prefix", so ctrl+d is not applicable to form the multiple cursors.

It could be nice if you could record your movements to form the "next" cursor and immediately see all future generated cursors given that movement (similarly to the "recursive draw" web app). Then you could perhaps truncate the infinite list of cursors at some finite point somehow, and then operate your multiple cursor operations.

"How do you make multiple cursors that are at the exact locations you need?"

There are a few simple tricks.

In this case, I hit "ctrl-d", which does the following:

1. If nothing is selected, it will select the word the cursor is on.

2. If something is selected, it will select the next match of this word, using another cursor.

In other words, I'll put my cursor on "def", hit ctrl-d, and "def" will be selected. Hit ctrl-d again, and the next "def" will be selected. Etc. Technically, in Sublime Text, every search makes a multiple cursor. I could hit alt-f3 (IIRC) to select all matches of "def", and they'd all be multi-selected.

But like I said, in this case it's really easy.

There are more advanced tricks - what if the word "def" appears inside the text? Well, you can select not only the def, but also the whitespace before the def, and it will selected the next "def" which is at that exact indentation. And like I mentioned in another comment, I even wrote a plugin to make multi-selections more easily, by splitting on a certain character. So that a list like this: (int a, int b, char c) can easily be split into 3 selections, around the comma.

Now that's the kind of thing I wish I would see in a "ST tricks" blog post.

Sounds great, hopefully someone ported this to emacs :-)

If you put the "/def<CR>" part in the macro too, then you can re-execute it multiple times.

I think it's actually useful, not simplified/convoluted..

Having switched to Vim, multiple cursors are the only reason I ever use Sublime Text anymore. They are insanely, amazingly awesome and powerful. I can't wait to see your efforts at porting the idea to Vim.

One note on your point about changing return behaviour: That's the ONE case a goto is IMO warranted. If I have to choose between a dummy function, code duplication and a goto, I choose goto.

I agree, but I didn't want to get bogged down in a "GOTO bad or not" discussion, which is why I left this detail out.

I'd go dummy function all the way.

No code duplication. No goto

well to each his own. In case of the cleanup phase before return I find it to be much cleaner with goto, since usually it's sub 10 lines and you'd have to program a function that gets pointers or objects passed that then get freed/destroyed, which I find ugly as hell. I look at such an outer procedure as an 'owner' of these objects and therefore I want to see the allocations and deallocations in plain text right there.

   if (somecondition):
     return
   if (anothercondition):
     return
 
   Now, let's say for a second that I just realized I don't 
   want to return, I want to do some processing, then 
   return. This happens a few times a day for me. I just 
   multi-select both "if"s, hit enter, and add the code.

Not a great example, because this only leads to code duplication.

jEdit has had this feature for a long time. It's one thing I miss, having moved to Vim.