Background: JEdit (and some other text editors as well) support a feature called Multiple simultaneous text insertion points. (at least that's what I'm calling it here).
To understand what this means, take a look at the link.
Out of all the features in use in modern text editors, initial research seems to indicate that this is one feature that both Emacs and Vim do not actually support. If correct, this would be pretty exceptional since it's quite difficult to find a text editor feature that has not made its way into at least one of these two old-school editors.
Question: Has anyone ever seen or implemented this feature in either Emacs, Vim, or both? If so, please point me to a link, script, reference or summary that explains the details.
If you know an alternate way to do the same (or similar) thing, please let me know.
Best Answer
The vim way to do this is the . command which repeats the last change. So, for instance, if I change a pointer to a reference and I have a bunch of obj->func that I want to change to obj.func then I search for obj->, do 2cw to change the obj-> to obj., then do n.n.n. until all the instances are changed.
Perhaps not a flexible as what you're talking about, but it works frequently and is very intuitive and fast when it does.