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Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

[To all Microsoft devs] Visual Studio supports this as well via an extension:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/2beb9705-b568-...

I did not find it particularly life-changing, but it's good to try to know if it's your thing.

Pretty sure it is sort of there already without any extra extensions. Place cursor on line, alt+shift+up/down arrow to duplicate cursor up or down

Defualt Visual Studio can column select and have one column that's used as an input point, which is really useful, but I personally don't find it as nice as having an arbitrary number of actual input cursors.

For instance, in Sublime Text if I have the following text:

  The
  quick
  brown
  fox

I can do the same Alt+Click drag kind of thing to get multiple cursors:

  |The
  |quick
  |brown
  |fox

But in Sublime they're actual input cursors, so I can do something like Ctrl+Right and get (note that the cursors don't need to stay lined up in a perfectly vertical column; they react to keyboard commands as though they were each just a single cursor. If you were to put right, at this point, the cursors would wrap around like a single cursor would):

  The|
  quick|
  brown|
  fox|

Then if I type a comma or something else, I'll get:

  The,|
  quick,|
  brown,|
  fox,|

Sublime also automatically surrounds selected text in quotes if you hit quote with selected text. So, after the initial column select, I could do Ctrl+Right, ", right, right then comma and end up with:

  "The",
  "quick",
  "brown",
  "fox",

The find dialogue in Sublime also lets you place cursors other ways. Doing a find-all can position a curosr at every instance found, and you can also hold Ctrl and insert extra cursors wherever you want, though I haven't found the latter to be quit as useful, personally.

It's not that any of this can't be done in another text editor (I'm a pretty heavy vim user and you can definitely do really neat stuff like this, especially with the panacea of plugins) but I find that the multi-cursor paradigm, where it's actual extra cursors, is really powerful for how intuitive it is.

Edit: I should also say that I've tried the multi cursor support in VIM and the Visual Studio cursor. They're both pretty good, but they don't exactly replicate the Sublime version, so far, and that's what I'd really like. Of course, if I really cared, I'd just go modify them and fix it myself :P

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