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Yeah, macros can do everything multiple cursors can do, but if multiple cursors is easier for people to use it's worth supporting. Gap buffers are an implement
by mattnewton 9y ago
Yeah, macros can do everything multiple cursors can do, but if multiple cursors is easier for people to use it's worth supporting.
Gap buffers are an implementation detail I don't care about as a user, I care about the features of my editor, so it is strange to suggest that I can't have a feature in order to preserve an implementation detail. A better argument would have been that speed is a more important feature, but the article didn't argue that multiple cursors are necesarily slower, just that a gap buffer would be slower with multiple cursors.
- Veedrac 9y ago> Yeah, macros can do everything multiple cursors can do Not everything. You can perform set operations on multiple selections, or filter them, eg. by keeping every nth or removing those on blank lines. You can save and restore selections, or use them as jump points. You can find their covering range, globally or on a line-by-line basis. You can count them or run scripts across them. Most importantly perhaps is you can copy them. Similarly, macros can do things multiple selections struggle with, largely because macros apply sequentially so the start to one can depend on the end of another.