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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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This would be a big advantage... except multiple cursors were invented so I can easily do that without having to memorize a whole new editing language.
Multiple cursors are fantastic for certain use cases, but will not help you when each line needs a different input -- if you're swapping arguments in function calls, if you're replacing one bracket type with another around contents of arbitrary length, etc.
Mind you, if your objective here is to not learn a new thing, then you can just go ahead and do that, you don't need an excuse.
Yeah, I usually do that with regexp replacement in other editors, but sometimes it's too hard to express as a regular expression
That's just one thing the editing language does, though. There's no single feature you can point to as the smoking gun; it's all the small advantages added together that make vi worthwhile.