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The main feature of Sublime Text 2 that makes it my editor of choice for programming (and anything else really) is multi-selection search and edit. It's like search-and-replace-on-steroids. Once you get used to, it's really hard to go back to not using it.

I did some research myself and couldn't find a single other editor that offers it as powerfully. Some even let you create several cursors but lack the searching bit (just found out that Notepad++ does that).

So I'd like to ask for this community's help: do you know of another programming editor that provide multi-selection search and editing in a similar level as Sublime does?

Chuim
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  • Is there any reason you're not content with Sublime Text 2? Why not just stick with it? – Liam Cain Feb 22 '12 at 00:43
  • I used to use Eclipse which is a full blown IDE before and I'm still missing features Sublime doesn't offer off the shelf (and probably never will given it's completely different focus). – Chuim Feb 23 '12 at 22:58
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    hmm... I used to use Eclipse for Java, then when I switched to Sublime Text I wasn't worried because all the features I needed, I could make with a python plugin. For example: https://github.com/BoundInCode/Display-Functions. But to each their own. Also, I assume you're on windows (since you mentioned Notepad++) but I believe Textmate 2 offers improved multiple cursor support. – Liam Cain Feb 23 '12 at 23:37
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    @BoundinCode the main reason most people just like my colleaques dont swap to ST2 like me, is that they want the object reference / go to function - I know there are some plugins for that, but most of them lose either performance or complete track. And we are just working on a 375.000 lines project. Therefore, these things are kind of essential. I am cool without it but for many thats the main killing point. – Richard Oct 19 '12 at 15:15

5 Answers5

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Cloud9 IDE does this.

Disclaimer: I work there.

  • i am having a hard time finding this feature in cloud 9 can you tell me how can I select multiple and edit at the same time. – Santosh Jul 23 '20 at 16:14
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More recently jetBrains began adding "Sublime Text style multi selection" to their line of IDEs. I know IntelliJ and Pycharm already have it.

Chuim
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vim seems to have support for that via plugins. See a related question on SO: Multiple selections in VIM

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three
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gedit 3 has a plugin which looks similar: http://codetree.com.au/projects/imitation/

seanf
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After switching from Sublime Text 2 to gedit, I've written a plugin that's much closer to Sublime's version of multiple cursors than imitation. I've tested the plugin on versions 3.4 and 3.12. You can find it here:

https://github.com/jessecrossen/Gedit-MultiCursor

I don't think it's 100% perfect yet, so I'd be really glad to hear of any edge cases people run across so I can continue to improve it. I've also implemented something like gedit's Command-R functionality with this plugin.

Those were pretty much the only two features I missed from Sublime, but then again I don't tend to use the deep features of any editor, so as to preserve my independence ;). The quick-open functionality is not as good as Sublime's "Goto Anything", but on the other hand you get usable integration with remote file systems mounted on FUSE, gvfs or similar, whereas Sublime tends to be slow because it's recursively indexing every file.

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Jesse Crossen
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  • Just a note that file **content** indexing in ST can be disabled by setting the `index_files` option to `false`. I did that when working with a project mapped through sshfs. It still maps all included file names/paths though. – Chuim Mar 17 '15 at 12:29
  • @Chuim Yes, indexing the names/paths is exactly the problem I had. With a large project, Sublime's automatic tree traversal causes manual drill-down to be unusably slow for a significant amount of time. The best thing IMO would be some way to mark or detect remote file systems and reduce features accordingly, but I understand that this would add significant configuration complexity. – Jesse Crossen Mar 19 '15 at 01:41