A Multiple Cursor Trick and an Improvement

I have been baking, in the back of my mind, a way to make multiple cursors more powerful. What I wanted was a way to move through a buffer, and mark certain places where I want to place my multiple cursors, and then make my changes. I think this idea is basically baked enough to reveal that… it is not actually necessary to modify the multiple-cursors library to achieve this goal.

If you want to do this, you can simply insert a sequence of characters that is unique at each point that you wish to place a cursor (something that you would never use, like some crazy Unicode character, say "ಠ_ಠ", you just have to find an easy way to insert it into the buffer). Then, select that tagging sequence and use mc/mark-all-like-this and edit away. This actually works in a pinch. For instance, you can do things like this:

However, I guess that this is slightly more hackish than I like, so I came up with a new, better method. What I decided would be pretty awesome is to have multiple-cursors be able to mark spots off the top of the mark ring (either via popping or just walking the mark ring). I defined a function mc/mark-pop that will just this. I use the suggested multiple cursors and expand region key bindings and bound mc/mark-pop to "C-S-p" (which makes sense on a Dvorak keyboard layout, if you use Qwerty, you might use "C-?"). This means that you can do some pretty awesome stuff like this:

I have submitted a pull request to Magnars which has been accepted. This is still a bit inconvenient to use, but it has promise for being an excellent building block for future multiple cursor editing tricks.