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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

emacs still does this IIUC. The beating heart of the emacs edit model is a "gap buffer" at the cursor.

There's a neat compare-and-contrast someone did awhile back on the gap buffer approach vs. the other approach often taken for code IDEs ("ropes"). The tl;dr is that gap buffers are actually really performant for a lot of cases except for having to edit at a lot of randomly-chosen cursor points far apart from each other (but how often is that your use case?).

https://coredumped.dev/2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-...

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> except for having to edit at a lot of randomly-chosen cursor points far apart from each other (but how often is that your use case?)

I use Sublime, and pretty often I do a "Find All" for some term; then Multiselect (Cmd+L); then select from cursor (Shift+RightArrow); and then type something. Which is essentially "editing at a lot of randomly [or at least arbitrarily]-chosen cursor points."

That, and IIRC Sublime actually does its "Find and Replace All" operation, as essentially this same multicursor-select-and-type operation internally. (If you have a large-enough buffer open, you can see it gradually doing it!)

I've never been able to make that work, but I respect that you have. Generally, that kind of select almost always grabs a bunch of substrings that aren't appropriate and I end up mangling my file.

I’ve never noticed any perceptible latency using iedit[1] in Emacs, which does what it sounds to me like you are describing.

It does suggest a possible multigap buffer structure though for efficiently doing simultaneous edits of distant locations in very large files. In that case though I’d probably be iediting a small wgrep[2] buffer anyhow so it might not really matter.

[1] https://github.com/victorhge/iedit

[2] https://github.com/mhayashi1120/Emacs-wgrep

I do the same thing in sublime. Doing it still feels like I have super powers even after years of doing it.

I’m sure there’s some magic key combo in emacs and/or vim to do it, too.

seems like Vim does too

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