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Comment by commandersaki | Hacker News Reader

That bit about search using the ripgrep plugin not providing context has always been available using telescope and a handful of clone plugins.

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Indeed, Vim has had ways to do this for years, before nvim. I suppose their point is that it comes out of the box? It is worded in a way that makes it seem like they think like there are no options.

There are other things too, like pressing `*` then using `:%s` is no different than the behaviour they describe. I use a plugin that shows you all the updates live as you type making it essentially the same as multiple cursors (for this example). The only difference is that you're typing on the command prompt as opposed to the current line.

I think showing live preview for replacements is also a built-in Neovim feature now, but I can't remember if it's enabled by default or not.

I suppose it is, my Neovim has always done this.

That is not the same as helix multiple selections. I suggest trying our helix to really understand.

I really liked helix, but the problem is that pretty much everything I use is setup using Vim bindings (shell, browser, ideavim,...) so switching to helix concept of editing was different enough to require effort, but close enough that it screwed up all my other muscle memory.

Fair enough, I definitely made some assumptions there, but it sure sounds the same based on the description. I guess `%` selects more than just the token?

But ya, I'm way too invested in Vim to bother with Helix. I have years of scripts and plugins I've written. I can't even be bothered to switch to nvim (I tried once and was not fun).

“%” is a range operator standing for the entire buffer; so :%s just means to start a substitution on the whole buffer. Neovim will highlight what was previously searched for, in this case matched by the *, but that won’t actually affect the search command.

The way :s works in Neovim looks like multiple cursors to me, but I’m not familiar enough with Helix to know what the difference is.

Ya, yes sorry, well aware of what `%` is, I was leaving out a lot of context there. Of course, as it turns out I was thinking in terms of my own mappings and not even then, I'm not sure why I thought `` came into play because my mapping is `gysiw<space>` (`w` can be replaced with other text objects) which populates the commandline with `%s/\<'.expand('<cword>').'\>//g` (and moves the cursor left twice). I just press `` a lot, sometimes even before replacing because I have it remapped to not autojump to the next match and rather `set hlsearch`. So ya, I'm all kinds of wrong bitten by my own config, lol.

Also :s without a range is not going to work like multiple cursor as it only acts on the current line, unless neovim has changed this for some reason. But again, I was assuming //g was a given.

If %s is Vim's answer to multiple cursors, then it's hopeless. I'm using both VSCodim and Vim, the former when doing dev, the latter for quick editing remotely through ssh. Tried Helix but it kind of annoyed me after years of using Vim.

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