I hear this. Hopefully, the author will be able to implement what Sublime has: a find all field (which accepts regular expressions), and results in multiple cursors on all the matches.

I do this all the time in Sublime and it's so natural:

Cmd+F, /regex/, opt+Enter, [replace, or commands or whatever]

It's just as fast as your usual find and replace or quick macro, except that you have instant feedback, are able to undo, jump around by word, or (with vim-mode), use t or f to find a character, ci", etc.

Selecting a match one case at a time is great, though, when you need to skip some matches. Say you have `old_var`, `old_var2`, and `old_var3`. Just start at the top of the function, and match, match, skip, match, skip, [type and replace]. Sure, you could do a regex on old_var[^\d], but depending on what you're matching and what you're skipping it sometimes is just not worth puzzling out the right regex.

I used to also have plugin for ST1, which allowed you to do common things like selecting a line, then splitting it by a separator. For example, you'd select a line, split it by ", ", and get a cursor on each paramater. It worked wonderfully for these kinds of things.