pawelgrzybek
Up next for 0.13: multiple cursors! I have no idea what I'd do with this feature but it sounds intriguing.
I'm not sure how people typically use neovim, but in Zed I find multiple cursors (especially combined with multiple file buffers) extremely ergonomic for refactoring quickly and easily where tools like find and replace or simple renaming doesn't suffice. It lets you scan through and add cursors where you need them, then perform your edits across locations and even files all at once. It's so nice that it played a significant role in me keeping Zed early on despite it missing a lot of extensions I used in VS Code.
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.
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)
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
Attenborough: Amazing DIY Orangutans | BBC Earth
You have very convenient macros.
If there is something you want to do in places you are going to mark first then you can just execute it right there instead. If it's just one edit you just do it right there without macro and use the dot to repeat it in more places.
If those places can be created automatically then again it's just a macro you execute over many lines.
Kakoune has replaced many features with multicursor, including the sed-like commands (where you just select an area, search for patterns inside it to create the multiple cursors, then perform regular edits (which also means you can perform much more complex than simple replaces).
It is really useful for refactors, e.g. even if you don't have any LSP (e.g. for plain text) you can easily rename symbols, reorder/select in log files, etc
It is really useful for refactors, e.g. even if you don't have any LSP (e.g. for plain text) you can easily rename symbols, reorder/select in log files, etc
Multi cursor support in VSCode replaced 98% of my need for macros. Yes, macros are more powerful, but they are pretty easy to get wrong. With multiple cursors, it's far easier to spot where your inputs don't work out and adjust accordingly.
Multi cursor is the feature that increased my productivity the most across the board.
Proper macros are vim and emacs one. They have proper movement shortcut that fits both code and prose.
Especially as code is formal notation, such that it’s structured quite rigidly, macros composition can be seen as a meta language. Multi cursors is more suited for the “work hard, not smart”, like preferring litteral search instead of learning regex.