What’s Mining: Multiple Cursors and Selection

Tatiana Vasilyeva

Hello everyone,

If you, as me, often dream of being in several places at once you will like this new feature coming to RubyMine from IntelliJ platform side! Please welcome multiple cursors and selection that you can already try in the last EAP version:

It was the top voted editor feature in our tracker and we hope you will like it. Let me go through this short demo in more detail and show you all the tricks.

Set multiple cursors

Let’s start with the very beginning. Using Alt with the mouse click you can set the cursors in all places you need (please note that you may always change the shortcut in Settings -> Keymap -> Editor Actions -> Add or Remove Caret):

You can also use keyboard. Please go to Settings -> Keymap -> Editor Actions and set up the shortcuts for Clone Caret Above and Clone Caret Below actions:

To switch off the multiple cursors and get back to single one, please press ⎋/Escape.

Edit your code simultaneously

Now, when multiple cursors are set, you can make some changes. For example, select the first words with Move Caret to Next Word with Selection (⌥⇧→/Ctrl+Shift+Right) action and move them to the end of lines with Cut (⌘X/Ctrl+X), Move Caret to Line End (⌘→/End) and Paste (⌘V/Ctrl+V) actions:

Or you can go back to the beginning of lines with Move Caret to Line Start (⌘←/Home) and capitalise the first letters with Right with Selection (⇧→/Shift+Right) and Toggle Case (⌘⇧U/Ctrl+Shift+U) actions:

Use code completion in multiple places at once

We’ve added an opportunity to use autocompletion and live templates with multiple selection as well. The context is determined from primary cursor’s location, resulting changes are applied to all cursors:

Find code occurrences to change

You can also easily change any repeating code fragment with Select All Occurrences (⌃⌘G/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+J) and Select/Unselect Next Occurrence (⌃G and ⇧⌃G/Alt+J and Shift+Alt+J ) actions:

Multiple cursors and selection feature as cool as it is to use now, it still has a long way to go: its implementation remains to be refined, and some limitations need to be dealt with. So we would really appreciate your feedback about it. Share your thoughts in our discussion forum and submit bug reports to the issue tracker. Thanks!

—
Develop with pleasure!
JetBrains RubyMine Team

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