Jedit has had multiple cursors built in for years. like '08 at least.
And multiple selections. I didn't find any use case for them.
They're GREAT for refactoring. Select something. CTRL-D a few times to keep selecting other instances of the same thing. It's not global find and replace.
Or, when you have a nice set of lined up/indented declarations, it's trivial to just right-click+SHIFT and drag a cursor before every line and start typing.
Visual Studio also has this with the MultiEditing plugin: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/2beb9705-b568-...
can it select, copy, paste and do zen-coding like expansions in multi-mode? if it can't do all of them or I can only use it to insert multiple cursors at search points (like the emacs multiple cursors plugin, sigh) I'll consider it useless for my workflow.
I said "arbitrary" exactly to differentiate from the emacs multiple cursors: I need to either add a cursor to each line of a selected region or add them based on search keywords, I can't just mindlessly ctr+click in 3 completely different non-adiacent places and have it work (or can I?).
Emacs support for multiple cursors is also available: https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el