3 ms·

Multicursors are one of these things that you don't understand the use for, until you start using them, at which point you can never go back. In order to unders

Multicursors are one of these things that you don't understand the use for, until you start using them, at which point you can never go back. In order to understand what they do, just have a look at all six gifs on this page: http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/. And sorry, but if you don't know about multicursors, I'm not sure whether you get what I mean with "Regex search over file or selection, results can be turned into multicursors". Just have a look at the animations in above URL. Can emacs do that without turning this into a big modding project?

judk 12y ago
So multicursor is an unhygenic version of semantic rename (refactoring)? Ew.
- FichteFoll 12y ago
  No, multicursors are way more powerful because you don't have to rename something in order to use them. The second animation on http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/ is a use case that has occured several times to me alone, and there are more (e.g. indenting only specific lines, aligning code).
xorcist 12y ago
Here's a datapoint against it. I forced myself to use multicursors for a while but I don't see the point at all. It's a more clumsy way to do replacements.
unhammer 12y ago
gif1: It seems the multiple-cursors package does this, though I don't quite see the point when you have regex-replace. gif2: I typically do this kind of stuff with CUA-rectangles: http://trey-jackson.blogspot.no/2008/10/emacs-tip-26-cua-mode-specifically.html http://trey-jackson.blogspot.no/2008/10/emacs-tip-26-cua-mod... Looks about the same. gif3: looks like M-x, though there are newer alternatives to M-x like smex that do more fancy matching: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex I feel like I'm faster with plain M-x, though haven't really given smex much of a chance gif4: There's a million packages that do this in various different ways (using recent files, VC-tracked files, bookmarks, Meta-dot with TAGS or parsers to go from symbols to definitions, etc.). I suppose people have different preferences for how to navigate quickly to other files. gif5: M-x occur is built-in. There's also multi-occur to show over several files, or occur-edit to edit directly from the list of hits without going into the file itself, etc. gif6: regex-replace also has been built-in forever, mc/mark-all-in-region-regexp seems to match this UI more closely though. But I'm sure lots of the newer Emacs packages have been inspired by Sublime or TextMate (or vim!) :-)
- m_mueller 12y ago
  Thank you!

judk 12y ago

So multicursor is an unhygenic version of semantic rename (refactoring)? Ew.

FichteFoll 12y ago
No, multicursors are way more powerful because you don't have to rename something in order to use them. The second animation on http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/ is a use case that has occured several times to me alone, and there are more (e.g. indenting only specific lines, aligning code).

xorcist 12y ago

Here's a datapoint against it. I forced myself to use multicursors for a while but I don't see the point at all. It's a more clumsy way to do replacements.

unhammer 12y ago

gif1: It seems the multiple-cursors package does this, though I don't quite see the point when you have regex-replace. gif2: I typically do this kind of stuff with CUA-rectangles: http://trey-jackson.blogspot.no/2008/10/emacs-tip-26-cua-mode-specifically.html http://trey-jackson.blogspot.no/2008/10/emacs-tip-26-cua-mod... Looks about the same. gif3: looks like M-x, though there are newer alternatives to M-x like smex that do more fancy matching: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex I feel like I'm faster with plain M-x, though haven't really given smex much of a chance gif4: There's a million packages that do this in various different ways (using recent files, VC-tracked files, bookmarks, Meta-dot with TAGS or parsers to go from symbols to definitions, etc.). I suppose people have different preferences for how to navigate quickly to other files. gif5: M-x occur is built-in. There's also multi-occur to show over several files, or occur-edit to edit directly from the list of hits without going into the file itself, etc. gif6: regex-replace also has been built-in forever, mc/mark-all-in-region-regexp seems to match this UI more closely though. But I'm sure lots of the newer Emacs packages have been inspired by Sublime or TextMate (or vim!) :-)

m_mueller 12y ago
Thank you!