iedit-mode (the basics)

iedit-mode (aka interactive-edit-mode) gives you the power to edit instances of the same text string in a buffer. It’s quite similar to multiple cursors, although if you’re used to working with multiple cursors, it’s likely you’ll prefer that.

IEdit defaults to selecting all matches, and then allows you to reduce and expand the matches in various ways, so the workflow is in the opposite direction.

I use iedit often as a quick interactive replace all, and multiple cursors for anything in between that and more complicated regexp search replace.

In conjunction with wgrep-mode (that is a writeable grep mode, which works with most grep alternative tools as well) iedit-mode can become a poweful way to edit a string across many files and review the changes before you save them.

To install it use M-x package-install iedit

Once installed you can start it with C-; (M-x iedit-mode)

Note, this doesn’t work in a terminal so in that case I’d bind it to C-c ;

Spacemacs has a binding for IEdit mode on it’s SPACE leader (SPC s e)