Multiple cursors / highlight next instance of currently highlighted word

Question

In Sublime Text, it's easy to select the next instance of a word by pressing command + d and also place multiple cursors by pressing command & clicking. I know I'm not alone in saying this is an incredibly useful function in editors.

I haven't had any luck in finding any key mappings or Alcatraz plugins for this, so I was interested to see if either there is a way to do this in xcode 5 which I might have missed or if there are plans to implement this in xcode 6?

If there isn't, and any xcode developers see this, would love to see this as a feature and hear your opinions on it :)

I'm shocked this doesn't have more votes. Is there any way to make feature requests that anyone knows of? For an IDE, XCode leaves a lot to be desired in terms of refactoring ability. — thumbtackthief, Jan 24 '15 at 23:28
Finally available with Xcode 10 Beta 3. Added details answer below. — Infinity, Jul 06 '18 at 18:00

score 118 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 27 '20 at 15:49

118

It is possible starting from Xcode 10 Beta 3

You can add selections for the next and previous find results using the “Find and Select Next” and “Find and Select Previous” menu commands.

Additionally, you can quickly add selections for the next and previous occurrences of the current selected text using the “Select Next Occurrence” and “Select Previous Occurrence” menu commands.

⌥⌘E to select next occurence of currently selected

⌥⇧⌘E to select previous occurence of currently selected

⌥⌘G to find and select next

⌥⇧⌘G to find and select previous

You can also use the Find menu to find these actions. Of course, feel free to bind it to different hotkeys!

edited Nov 27 '20 at 15:49

Robin Daugherty

7,115
4
45
59

answered Jul 06 '18 at 17:49

Infinity

3,695
2
27
35

2

You can also `command + left click` the word and choose `Edit all in scope` to do this! – Leonard Nov 12 '18 at 04:47
1

`option` on mac keyboards instead of `ALT` – willcwf Jan 03 '20 at 17:32

Max Chuquimia · Answer 2 · 2018-04-04T06:49:02.890

47

If what you're wanting to do is change the name of a variable, then when your cursor is on the variable press control+command+E and type away. (This is "Edit All in scope")

For editing on a Project scope there is always the Editor > Refactor > Rename menu item

edited Apr 04 '18 at 06:49

answered Jul 22 '14 at 10:58

Max Chuquimia

7,494
2
40
59

5

Thanks! Not quite what I was looking for unfortunately, but this is probably as close as we'll get at the moment. – Matt Rowles Jul 23 '14 at 00:19
That solves the issue only sometimes - perhaps I want to append `<< std::endl` to multiple places, for example. – OJFord Nov 27 '14 at 21:09
@OllieFord It would often work in the case you described.. it selects all instances of what you selected but it doesn't care if you add spaces and such. But perhaps what you're trying to point out is that you wouldn't want the text after every use of the variable – csga5000 Jan 06 '16 at 20:42

score 23 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 12 '15 at 19:43

23

Highlight the word you'd like to get the next instance, then press:

⌘ + E

and

⌘ + G.

Continuing to press ⌘ + G will cycle through all instances of the word you pressed ⌘ + E on.

I have more xcode shortcuts on my site that I sometimes reference.

answered Aug 12 '15 at 19:43

Sohail

588
4
6

5

Yeah, but this only finds the next instance, it doesn't give you the ability to place a new cursor at each instance as you go. – Matt Rowles Sep 19 '15 at 04:03

Alex · Answer 4 · 2019-03-15T10:20:14.113

16

You can create cursors with Shift + Ctrl + Mouse Click wherever you need more cursor

You can either use Shift + Ctrl + ▼ (or ▲) if you want to create a new cursor on the following line.

Option + Mouse Drag also works very well

edited Mar 15 '19 at 10:20

answered Dec 06 '18 at 14:21

Alex

448
6
11

score 6 · Answer 5 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

6

I just read on twitter that Xcode team has added multiple cursors feature for testing, but kept it hidden.To enable it use following command.

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode PegasusMultipleCursorsEnabled -bool true

Link for your reference. Multiple Cursor in Xcode

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

1
1

answered Apr 24 '18 at 05:33

Vaibhav

865
2
10
19

score 5 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 05 '18 at 16:30

5

Apple just released Xcode 10 beta with the following feature:

The Xcode Source Editor now supports multi-cursor editing allowing you to quickly edit multiple ranges of code at once. You can place additional cursors with the mouse via ⌃+⇧+Click or with column select (⌥+Click+Drag), or with the keyboard using ⌃+⇧+Up to column select up or ⌃+⇧+Down to column select down. (12564506)

answered Jun 05 '18 at 16:30

Jordan Hochstetler

1,308
3
17
28

1

This is a step in the right direction, but still doesn't reveal if it's implementing next-instance-of-highlighted-code capture also. Thanks for update! – Matt Rowles Jun 09 '18 at 02:03

Daniel Schlaug · Answer 7 · 2016-05-03T07:18:44.447

There's the Xcode-Multi-Edit-Plugin. It's still not quite like Sublime because the multiple cursors can't be used to edit beyond the selection you made when you started command-d-ing but it's close enough.

The plugin is not updated for Xcode 7.3 but this can be easily fixed by adding

    <string>ACA8656B-FEA8-4B6D-8E4A-93F4C95C362C</string>

to the list of similar UUIDs in <key>DVTPlugInCompatibilityUUIDs</key> in the plugin's Info.plist. (Found at ~/Library/Application\ Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Plug-ins/XcodeMultiEdit.xcplugin/Contents/Info.plist)

Another promising plug-in which currently lacks Xcode 7.3 support is Multiplex.

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 14 '21 at 03:26

0

I figure a way: double click to select then click one more time to highlight all occurrences.

answered Apr 14 '21 at 03:26

dairan

26
5

Multiple cursors / highlight next instance of currently highlighted word

8 Answers8

Linked

Related