In human–computer interaction, simultaneous editing is an text editing technique allowing a single user to make multiple simultaneous edits in a multiple selection at once through direct manipulation.
Multiple selections and cursors are typically created by using a keyboard shortcut to select repeated instances of the same text or text fragments surrounded by the same delimiters, by using a search feature to select all instances of a search term, by selecting the same column in multiple lines, or by selecting text or cursor positions with a mouse. The Lapis experimental web browser and text editor is also able to infer selections based on concept learning from positive and negative examples given by the user during a process known as selection guessing.
Tools for data wrangling (mass reformatting) also sometimes include commands for simultaneous editing of all data in a column or category.
Editors supporting simultaneous editing Simultaneous editing in Lapis Multiple selections in Sublime Text Multiple cursors in Cloud9 Multi-cursor package in Atom Multiple selections in Visual Studio Code Multiple selections in Firefox developer tools Multiple-cursors in Emacs Multi Edit plug-in for gedit and a demo video. Multi-Editing Settings in Notepad++ Multiple carets in PyCharm Column Edit Mode in Vi and Vi derivatives such as Vim
See also Batch renaming
References
Copy-and-Paste between Overlapping Windows by Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel. In Proceedings of CHI'07. "Other systems have been proposed to support fast copy-paste of multiple selections or text entities like phone numbers" Citeseer LAPIS: Smart Editing with Text Structure introductory article. Lightweight Structured Text Processing, an extended description Robert C. Miller, Brad A. Myers: Multiple selections in smart text editing. 103–110, IUI 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 13–16, 2002, San Francisco, California, USA. ACM, 2002,