Able to exchange two regions selected visually with multiple-cursors

[tommcdo]

I don't know anything about the multiple-cursors plugin (aside from a high-level understanding of what it does). Can you describe the workflow that you're interested in?

[ghost]

Basically if you press ctrl-d on a word, in selects the other words visually and when press c changing them at the same time, like refactoring or in multiple lines. More data at https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors

[tommcdo]

So would the desired workflow be something like this?

1. Use multiple-cursors to select multiple occurrences of the same word
2. Type X to mark the multiple selections for an exchange
3. Use multiple cursors to select another set of a different word
4. Type X to invoke the swap of all occurrences of the first word with all occurrences of the second word

Sounds pretty interesting and useful. I don't want to get your hopes up right now, as there's a lot more I need to know before I can judge whether this is feasible. My gut feeling right now is that it will be too complicated to support, and building a one-off specialized solution is probably a better bet.

I can think of a way to achieve this result with a different workflow using another plugin. Abolish.vim provides a :Subvert command (can be shortened to :S) which can help to do a pairwise swap of words. For example, you could use this:

:%S/{foo,bar}/{bar,foo}/gc

That will replace all foos with bar and all bars with foo (the c flag makes it ask for confirmation at each occurrence). It's admittedly not as easy as the workflow you're proposing, but it could fill the void for now.

Some things I need to consider:

1. How does multiple-cursors actually execute the command?
   • Does it work for all Visual mode commands?
   • Does it apply the command to each execution serially?

To support this, I think exchange.vim would need to have a way to let the user specify whether the operation is to mark an operand for exchanging or perform the actual exchange. Right now, it uses the same operator for both.

[ghost]

Actually yes, but multiple-cursors is working in hybrid-X mode. I stopped to use vim-multiple-cursors and i started to use vim-visual-multi. (mg979/vim-visual-multi). Actually its much more improved, also it can uses default visual mode mappings that means it can run every map. So after pressing , it deactivates mode but cursors is stays selected already, and you can do operations on them. I dont know too much things about it. I'm not sure if it would work.

[ghost]

I'll request mg979 to add support for this plugin because understanding of visual multi plugin should be hard. For him much easier.