Simultaneous editing

For workgroup tools allowing several users to edit the same document, see collaborative editing and collaborative real-time editor.

A screencast demonstration of simultaneous editing using the multiple selection feature of Sublime Text v3.

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

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

• 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, ISBN 1-58113-459-2