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Comment by cube_yellow | Hacker News Reader

I am honestly, genuinely confused why anyone gives two shits about some minor IDE feature that has been part of other editors (Sublime, Vim, Emacs, more?), for at least three years now. If someone could help me understand why this has 51 points right now, that would be greatly appreciated.

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Some people, myself included, use Jetbrains' IDEs much more heavily than the aforementioned editors. Personally, I love their IDEs and comparing them to the aforementioned editors is really unfair as the IDEs offer features that are simply impossible in text editors. Multi-select is one of the features that would make the aforementioned editors even more dispensable and the IDEs even better.

Thanks! That answers my original question.

Now for the flamewar: Is there anything that a non-emacs/vim IDE or editor can do that both emacs and vim cannot? Aside from social inertia (e.g. your colleagues use it, it's your first and only power editor), I have a hard time understanding why anyone would use anything else.

My hunch is that it's primarily a marketing problem, especially for emacs.

Of course. Language specific code insight (real-time interactive static code analysis, essentially), navigation, context code completion, and refactoring (in whole project). I find these to be the most valuable features of IDEs. I'm not sure if vim/emacs can do multi-language syntax highlighting (for fixing that nasty spaghetti) and what their level of support for debugging is (through plugins), but those would be next on the list.

EDIT: As far as vim, it is supported in any decent IDE (including Jetbrains' ones), so in that sense, it can do a huge percentage of what vim can do as well (not sure about emacs).

Its a very useful feature, and its becoming more well-known and requested by users of power editors .. which is a good thing, because multiple-cursors was a feature that we had in the 80's, but somehow got neglected .. and now its back again.

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