I used to think "surely this is just fancy find and replace".

But actually it's more like defining a keyboard macro. It's very powerful and quicker and easier than a macro for a lot of tasks.

Yep, to me it's not far superior to find-replace: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/09/07/

With the right controls it might be a better (more flexible) version of Vim's block selection mode. Which I use almost daily, it's super useful but depends on lines being vertically aligned, which multiple cursors don't need to care about.

But I don't see another purpose for them; find-replace with regex support and macros only fail in rare cases where actual syntax parsing is needed.

I think the utility is proportional to the degree of repetition in your files.

You are not. Perhaps people who use it can elaborate, but it seems to be an interactive search-and-replace with highlighting. Is it anything more?

In vscode if my cursor is in a word, i Ctrl+D to select that, then Ctrl+D to select further matches, then begin typing over them. There's other modes too where you can just add more cursors to a line below/above but i find less use for that.

But in vim it's not much slower to do:

    /<search term>
    cgn  " change this this i just matched
    .    " find next occurance AND execute the change here too, i don't have to say "n ." because i used cgn above instead of something like cw

But i still end up relying on

    qq  " stick a macro in q register
    <complex edit sequence>
    @q / @@

For more gnarly stuff

presuming you did a `/<search>` for the results you want, you can follow it up with:

  :%s//<replacement>/gc

It is more like interactive editor macros where you can see the intermediate results on the fly.

The advantage over search-and-replace is that you get to work with a nice, familiar language (the interactive commands you send to your editor) rather than using regex.