Comments on: How to quickly change several lines at once

By: Nicholas Riley

Nicholas Riley — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:17:52 +0000

Languages like Smalltalk let you send multiple messages to the same object without having to type the name of the object repeatedly. You'd think Objective-C would have learned something after all this years :-)

But yeah, rectangle editing is useful. I only learned about the rectangle commands in Emacs about a year ago, and they're great, even if they don't provide the same highlighting and feedback as vim does. You'd do the above with:

1. C-SPC, to set the mark.
2. M-f (or C-right), to go to the end of the word.
3. M-7 down (or M-7 C-n for those people who hate arrow keys :-), to go down 7 lines.
4. C-x r t for "string rectangle", i.e. "replace rectangular selection"
5. Type "panel", hit return.

By: David Paul Robinson

David Paul Robinson — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:49:31 +0000

Great video, thanks!

By: Jesper

Jesper — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:38:37 +0000

Sören: That's correct, except that there's three popular Cocoa developer's text editors, and the biggest one of them is Xcode. ;)

By: Sören Nils 'chucker' Kuklau

Sören Nils 'chucker' Kuklau — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:18:42 +0000

Cocoa text editors like TextEdit and Xcode have rectangular selection, but not rectangular editing; you will obliterate all the lines, but only insert your new text into the first line. This is not useful.

Indeed, Cocoa doesn't normally offer this. The two popular Cocoa developer's text editors, SubEthaEdit and TextMate, both do, however.