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0 pointssokoloff6y ago0 comments

As an emacs user, I view multi-cursor as suitable for only a subset of macro usage. Macros are inspectable, editable, savable, able to be applied across files, easily used a variable N times.

My typical pattern is something like: define it, try it, adjust it, then apply variable times (including “infinite until error”), maybe save 1% of them. That often takes less time to do than it just took me to describe.

I use macros probably 25x for every one time I reach for multi-cursors, though to be fair, if I came the other way, I’d probably use multi-cursor more often than currently. (I used macros for 30 years before getting multi-cursors, so if both can do the job, I’ll use a macro.)

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jakear6y ago

> Macros are inspectable, editable, savable, able to be applied across files, easily used a variable N times.

In my experience with multicursor, I don't need to be able to "inspect" the operation as the act of typing it is inspection in and of itself. Sure they aren't saveable and thus aren't editable (but you admit this is a very rare use case - I can't recall needing that, ofc you often don't know when to want what you don't have).

As for applying across a number of files, I recently added an in-editor rendering of workspace search results to VS Code, and I've created an extension that can apply edits to those search results back to the original files. This allows for performing multicursor edits across many files.

As for using variable numbers of times, this is again quite trivial with multicursor. I simply select all the instances I need (either all in one go or iteratively), and go from there. I admit there is an art to selecting the right text such that iterative selection works with a single keypress, but once you get the hang of it it becomes pretty natural. (Unless you mean "apply this N times", which again I'm not sure I've ever been in want of)

sokoloffOP6y ago

The question might boil down to use case. If the use case is “in this file, change all spans with class foo to divs with class bar once ever”, probably both tools will work.

If the use case is “every day, download this file from a server and process it using pre-defined text editing commands”, multi-cursor doesn’t help you in any way that I can see.

I admit there’s a huge overlap in use, but when someone asks for macros and a product person says “how about multi-cursor instead?” I think it’s fair to raise the cases where someone asking for macros might actually want macros.

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