[TxMt] Multiple simultaneous arbitrary caret locations (with optional highlighting)

[Duane Johnson]

On Apr 25, 2006, at 9:32 AM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

> On Apr 25, 2006, at 10:21 AM, thomas Aylott wrote:
>
>> Excellent points, all.
>> Maybe we'll just come up with some random command to make it work  
>> by replacing the document with a snippet.
>
> Probably once we get mouse gestures, then the snippet idea might  
> actually work (at least for the first command click), reasonably well.
> Of course, we could, even now, have a key that inserts a "special  
> character", and once you've inserted all the special characters at  
> each location you want, then have a command that reads the entire  
> document and inserts it as a snippet, replacing those special  
> characters with $1 or something. We could build this as is now, and  
> make it require less keystrokes once mouse gestures are around.
>
> Not sure what the scaling performance of inserting the entire  
> document as a snippet is, but it's worth a try.
>
>> Obviously it couldn't work exactly the same. :D
>>
>> Thanks for letting us down easily
>
> Haris

Beautiful--that's an excellent idea.  In fact, this would cover  
almost all of my use cases, since one could highlight and replace any  
word with this "special character".

On another note, Soryu was suggesting that the new "markers" that  
Allan is working on might be a useful tool for implementing this.   
Perhaps command-clicking could add a marker to that spot, and then we  
could create a "marker-to-snippet" command?

Duane

PS Allan, I don't think this feature would be as unpopular as you  
think.  Mac users are trained and adept at using the mouse in  
conjunction with the keyboard.  This is a long neglected area of  
"power editing" in the text editor world, as most text editors only  
implement the most rudimentary of mouse/keyboard interoperation.