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Comment by gesis | Hacker News Reader

I am so used to sed-style, regex powered find/replace, that this use admittedly never occured to me. As a result, multi-cursor seemed mostly useless outside of pair programming that I never do.

I will have to try it out once it lands in neovim just to see if I can wrap my muscle memory around it.

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I've always told myself I should learn to do these sed/regex find and replace techniques, but my origins are not sophisticated and I use computers like that orangutan hammering nails in the video with David Attenborough https://youtu.be/IFACrIx5SZ0?si=NcWGBNq272KoYB2i&t=84

It's entirely possible that you don't need multiple cursors

For me the nice thing about multiple cursors is when it would take more time to write the regex than it does to just throw down say 8 cursors and update the spots.

There’s an overlap between “Find and Replace” and Macros, but it’s too small for multi cursors to be particularly useful for me. Especially with emacs where I can bring up all the lines in a separate buffer and edit them there (occur-mode) or do the same for a set of files (grep-mode and wgrep)

How do you place the cursors then?

In vim?

Ctrl+v, 8, j, shift+i, add the text, Esc.

Which works if you need to edit several aligned lines in a row. The one thing I'm missing is putting the cursors on the next found position of a search term which would make it much more useful.

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