I am aware that I’m kind of late to this party, but I finally (after being taunted a few times by one of my friends who uses Sublime Text) tried out Magnar Sveen’s multiple cursors Emacs library, and I have to say that I really like it. It has a lot of stuff included, but currently I’m only using the basics:
(global-set-key (kbd "C->") 'mc/mark-next-like-this) (global-set-key (kbd "C-S-<mouse-1>") 'mc/add-cursor-on-click)
(I have a few more bindings in my init.el, but as of now I only use these two.)
It has its drawbacks – the main one is that only a subset of Emacs commands are supported, most notably, isearch is missing (and yes, I do understand that it might be nontrivial to make it work with multiple cursors), but I like it a lot anyway. I’m not quitting iedit anytime soon, nor do I abandon keyboard macros, but multiple cursors sometimes seem faster than macros, and they can do more sophisticated things than iedit, so I’m sticking with them, too. And even if they didn’t have any advantages over macros/iedit, the sheer coolness factor makes me giggle every time I use them
.
And btw, apparently there is some discussion on emacs-devel about supporting them in core Emacs, which sounds good.