Simultaneous editing explained

In human–computer interaction, simultaneous editing is an end-user development technique allowing a single user to make multiple simultaneous edits of text 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.^[1]

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^[2]
• Multiple selections in Sublime Text^[3]
• Multiple cursors in Cloud9^[4]
• Multi-cursor package in Atom^[5]
• Multiple selections in Visual Studio Code^[6]
• Multiple selections in Firefox developer tools^[7]
• Multiple-cursors in Emacs^{[8] [9]}
• Multi Edit plug-in for gedit^[10]
• Multi-Editing Settings in Notepad++^[11]
• Multiple carets in PyCharm^[12]
• 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,

Notes and References

1. Web site: LAPIS: Smart Editing with Text Structure.
2. Web site: LAPIS - Editing Text with Lightweight Structure. 24 May 2016.
3. Web site: Sublime Text - A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. 24 May 2016.
4. Web site: Multiple Cursors - Cloud9. 24 May 2016.
5. Web site: Multi-cursor package. 24 May 2016.
6. Web site: Multiple selections (multi-cursor). 4 November 2016.
7. Web site: Editable box model, multiple selection, Sublime Text keys + much more – Firefox Developer Tools Episode 31 . Mozilla . May 7, 2014 . 7 May 2014 . Heather Arthur and Robert Nyman.
8. Web site: Multiple cursors for emacs.. .
9. Web site: Emacs Rocks! Episode 13: multiple-cursors. 24 May 2016.
10. Web site: New gedit plugin: multi edit. and a demo video.
11. Web site: Multi editing. 2016-06-17. 2016-08-09. https://web.archive.org/web/20160809222901/https://notepad-plus-plus.org/features/multi-editing.html. dead.
12. Web site: Multiple carets. 2 July 2020.