Which editors out of Emacs, Vim and JEdit support multiple simultaneous text insertion points?

Question

Background: JEdit (and some other text editors as well) support a feature called Multiple simultaneous text insertion points. (at least that\'s what I\'m callin

Answer 1

In EMACS, you could/would do it with M-x find-grep and a macro. If you really insist that it be fully automatic, then you'd include the find-next in the macro.

But honestly, this strikes me as a sort of Microsoft-feature: yes, it adds to the feature list, but why bother? And would you remember it existed in six months, when you want to use it again?

Answer 2

It should be something like this in vim:

%s/paint.\((.*),/\1.paint(/ 

Or something like that, I am really bad at "mock" regular expressions.

The idea is substitute the pattern:

/paint(object,/ 

with

/object.paint(/ 

So, yes, it is "supported"

Answer 3

Another slight similarity: In Emacs, the rectangle editing features provided by cua-selection-mode (or cua-mode) automatically gives you multiple insertion points down the left or right edge of the marked rectangle, so that you can type a common prefix or suffix to all of those lines.

e.g.:
M-x cua-selection-mode RET (enable the global minor mode, if you don't already use this or cua-mode)
C-RET down down down (marks a 1x3 character rectangle)
type prefix here
C-RET (unmark the rectangle to return to normal editing)

Answer 4

moccur-edit.el almost does what you want. All the locations matching the regexp are displayed, and the editing the matches makes changes in the corresponding source. However, the editing is done on a single instance of the occurrence.

I imagine it'd be straight forward to extend it to allow you to edit them all simultaneously (at least in the simple case).

There is a demo of it found here.

Turns out, the newest versions of moccur-edit don't apply changes in real-time - you must apply the changes. The changes are also now undoable (nice win).