Simultaneous editing

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

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.

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

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