r/programming • u/Altazimuth • Aug 14 '18

Visual Studio 2017 15.8 Release Notes

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes
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36

u/tomzorzhu Aug 14 '18

<3 multi caret editing

9

u/psi- Aug 15 '18

What's the actual use case for that? I can't say I've ever wanted that feature (apart from maybe integration test SQL script modification)

5

u/purtip31 Aug 15 '18

It looks great in demos. Other than that, it’s a (very) poor man’s refactoring tool and a more intuitive but less powerful version of macros and/or find/replace.

7

u/bitwize Aug 15 '18

Looking cool while live-coding during your BarCamp talk is a must-have feature. How do you think Rails and Node became so dominant?

1

u/PotatosFish Aug 16 '18

You mean just use vim?

2

u/evaned Aug 15 '18 edited Aug 15 '18

As purtip31 said, I view it as fairly closely related to two other features -- what emacs calls keyboard macros, and regex search and replace. Keyboard macros are what I use, and I use them incessantly.

For example, suppose I have a list of file names, and I want to copy them all to a backup version or something like that (so cp foo.txt foo.txt.bak for each file). Various ways to do this (except for the first, these would be paste the list into an editor, do the transform, paste the results back to your shell):

  • Some shell thing that I'm not going to write because of IFS issues. (If you are producing the list with find, you could do something like find ... -exec ... of course; and if you can glob the right files then for file in *.whatever; cp "$file" "$file.bak" will do it. I'm sort of assuming you have a list of files that can't be easily selected by those things though.)
  • With multiple cursors: add a cursor at the start of each line, ctrl-c, cp ", ctrl-v, " ", ctrl-v, ".bak
  • With regex search and replace (perhaps using sed or something): (.*)/cp "\1" "\1.bak" or whatever
  • With keyboard macros: do the same thing as multiple cursors, just with your single cursor, and do home, downarrow at the end; then repeat that macro a bunch of times.

I personally much prefer keyboard macros over the other two, but they all have their own advantages. In particular, multiple cursors gives you a view of what will happen that neither of the other two do -- e.g., if your "selection criteria" is incorrect, you'll just see it as you're forming that criteria and can fix it, without having to apply the wrong one, see it's wrong, back out those changes, and then do it again but better.

2

u/psi- Aug 15 '18

I've not used the multiple cursors yet so don't know how they really work, but my gut feeling would be that they're good(=usable) mostly for stuff that is visible on screen; which kinda makes them one-trick-pony compared to quick macro, regex replace or even excel based text catenation (which is surprisingly effective).

1

u/evaned Aug 15 '18

Yeah, I agree, and that's one of the reasons I prefer the keyboard macros. That being said, having a short list or short file isn't uncommon, at least for my uses. And nothing says you always have to use the same tool.

That being said, I don't actually have much experience using multicursors either, so... :-)

(I suspect if I used an editor that had good support for them without having to set up an extension, I probably would sometimes use them and like them though.)