Structular regular expressions for multiple cursors

[gavlooth]

There is a vim clone - vis - that has multiple cursor support and a very neat future that pairs very well. Essentially, you create complex operations by combining sam9's regular expressions.
This might be a killer future.

[kirawi]

It's not obvious to me what structural regex is, but the name alone suggests something along the lines of: #3476

[pascalkuthe]

We already have regex based selection: s and K

[gavlooth]

@pascalkuthe sregex is not regex based selection. Is chaining commands based on regexes on selections eg
"Change all occurrences of the complete word "foo" to "bar" except those occurring in double or single quoted strings:

y/".*"/ y/'.*'/ x/[a-zA-Z]+/ g/^foo$/ c/bar/ | p"

x/<p>/<cmd>: returns a string where all substrings matching the regular expression

have been replaced with the return value of applied to the particular substring.
y/<p>/<cmd>: returns a string where each part of the string that is not matched by

is replaced by applying to the particular unmatched string.
...
The idea is that you select something and then chain multiple regex commands at once to manipulate text

[gavlooth]

I am not saying that you cannot do selection manipulation with key chords, but it is convenient to have the
command language.

[pascalkuthe]

that's an explicit non-goal for helix. That's just vim search/replace (maybe more powerful). Helix is fundamentally based around selections. A command either manipulates selection or changes content. Fused commands purposefully don't exist and won't be added. That's a core design choice