Question 280917 in Visual Studio Code Question posted in
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Visual Studio Code – How can I enable multi-cursor occurrence highlight for multiple files in VS Code?

In VS Code, I can press Ctrl+D, multiple times, with a word selected inside a file and it will select all the occurrences of that same word in a multi-cursor fashion, which is great.

Now, I want to do the same, but over multiple files. If I use the "search" tool in the left menu, I can easily select all the occurrences where I would like to change, over multiple files. There is a "Replace with" option, but my case is not just replacing text with the same text. I would need to copy something from each line and place it again on the same line — as you can easily do with multi-cursor selection.

So I would like to combine both things: multi-cursor selection, but among multiple files. So a multi-file-multi-cursor selection, lets say.

Is that possible?

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Answers


  1. 0

    Yes, you press "Open new search editor" above the search bar (or in Ctrl+Shift+P) and search for your string there.

    The search results are presented as if they were a bit text file, and multi-cursor works there.

    But probably manually grepping for the string is more convenient.

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  2. 0

    but my case is not just replacing text with the same text. I would need to copy something from each line and place it again on the same line — as you can easily do with multi-cursor selection.

    Note that regex find and replace in the Search View is a thing. You can use regex grouping. Ex. If you want to replace <ignore> <some-alphas> <some-nums> <ignore> with <some-nums> <some-alphas>, you could turn on regex mode, search for ([a-zA-Z]+) ([0-9]+) and then put $2 $1 in the replace field, adjust the search details like include files / exclude files patthers, dismiss any finer-grained matches you don’t want to touch, and then replace all.

    As for the thing with occurrence selection, VS Code 1.85 just added multi-document occurrence highlighting: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_84#_multidocument-highlighting (just visual highlighting and not actual text selection / cursor creation) (see the setting editor.multiDocumentOccurrencesHighlight which defaults to false in v1.85). So it doesn’t seem like a big stretch for them to also implement actual text selection of occurrences across documents / editors. If you’d like for that to be a thing, I’d suggest to raise an issue ticket. If you do, please comment here with a link to your issue ticket or edit the link into this answer post.

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