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What's the fuss with multiple cursor? Emacs has these too (of course) but seriously WTF!? Who programs in languages so mediocre that there are repetition ever

What's the fuss with multiple cursor? Emacs has these too (of course) but seriously WTF!? Who programs in languages so mediocre that there are repetition everywhere and that working is so repetitive that having multiple cursors actually helps? Do you really have to enter the same thing so often that having "multiple cursors" makes you more productive and is considered a "killer feature"!? All I see is that if you need that you have way too much repetition in your "code". I don't like repetitive stuff. That's what computers are good for. That's what I do as a programmer: I carefully craft my tools so that all the stupid repetitive tasks are done by my programs (or by my programmable text editor).

CognitiveLens 14y ago
For programming, I don't find the multiple cursor thing very useful, but for markup (especially html), it's extremely useful, particularly when working with legacy systems that don't have very powerful server-based building of HTML from templates. In these cases, HTML can be very repetitive, and grabbing a set of <li>s that you want to add a class to is as simple as highlighting the first <li>, hitting Cmd-D a few times, and then editing them all at once.
goostavos 14y ago
Whoa, whoa, whoa... hey, buddy, calm down. Some people liking the ol' multi-cursor does not scream volumes about about their programming style, or "mediocre" language of choice. You sir, are just being ridiculous. I'll say this about multi-cursor, it is one of those things that until you have it, you don't know you missed it. When I first tried sublime my thought pattern went "Wha? Multi-cursor? When will I ever use -- Oh my god how did I live without this!?" Simple use case that comes to mind: quick refactorings. I'm a believer in self documenting code, so I'm often changing the names of my function calls as I get deeper into the domain of the problem. With Sublime Text, I highlight the function in question, spam `ctrl + d` a bunch of times to set the multicursors in position, and from there, I'm free to type away whilst the multicursors edit my entire document.
Silhouette 14y ago
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not just trolling. Multiple cursors can be useful for doing things like quick renames, which itself is already useful in a general text editor that is used with many different file formats. However, for me, they are often more useful because you can pick out general patterns of text/symbols and do the same thing to all of them. Want an extra <th></th> just after each <tr> in four lines of an HTML file? No problem. Want to split a list of function parameters onto separate lines when they don't fit on one any more, or the other way around? No problem. Sure, in many cases you could do these things with a find-and-replace as well, but that might involve making a selection to limit the scope of the replace operation, setting up some sort of regex to make sure you only find the copies of the original text you actually want, setting up another regex to do the replacement without disrupting anything else nearby, and so on. Using multiple cursors is often much more efficient.

CognitiveLens 14y ago

For programming, I don't find the multiple cursor thing very useful, but for markup (especially html), it's extremely useful, particularly when working with legacy systems that don't have very powerful server-based building of HTML from templates. In these cases, HTML can be very repetitive, and grabbing a set of <li>s that you want to add a class to is as simple as highlighting the first <li>, hitting Cmd-D a few times, and then editing them all at once.

goostavos 14y ago

Whoa, whoa, whoa... hey, buddy, calm down. Some people liking the ol' multi-cursor does not scream volumes about about their programming style, or "mediocre" language of choice. You sir, are just being ridiculous. I'll say this about multi-cursor, it is one of those things that until you have it, you don't know you missed it. When I first tried sublime my thought pattern went "Wha? Multi-cursor? When will I ever use -- Oh my god how did I live without this!?" Simple use case that comes to mind: quick refactorings. I'm a believer in self documenting code, so I'm often changing the names of my function calls as I get deeper into the domain of the problem. With Sublime Text, I highlight the function in question, spam `ctrl + d` a bunch of times to set the multicursors in position, and from there, I'm free to type away whilst the multicursors edit my entire document.

Silhouette 14y ago

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not just trolling. Multiple cursors can be useful for doing things like quick renames, which itself is already useful in a general text editor that is used with many different file formats. However, for me, they are often more useful because you can pick out general patterns of text/symbols and do the same thing to all of them. Want an extra <th></th> just after each <tr> in four lines of an HTML file? No problem. Want to split a list of function parameters onto separate lines when they don't fit on one any more, or the other way around? No problem. Sure, in many cases you could do these things with a find-and-replace as well, but that might involve making a selection to limit the scope of the replace operation, setting up some sort of regex to make sure you only find the copies of the original text you actually want, setting up another regex to do the replacement without disrupting anything else nearby, and so on. Using multiple cursors is often much more efficient.