[Arch-TK]

For this specific example it's a visual block select of <foo > / <baz > cut and then visual select of <1st > / <2nd > and paste. But that's relying on things being the right width.

This is two lines, if everything was a different length, I think by the time I got multiple cursors to do this, I would have long managed by just doing the same editing task twice (cut overwrite-paste then cut overwrite-paste).

If I had to do this for many more lines I would have just used a substitution:

    :s/\(.*\)"\(\w\+\) \(\w\+\)" # \(.*\)\(\d\+\w\+\).\*/\1"\3" # \4\2 key/

And yes, that's 100% unreadable, but it was easy to write with the preview mode on modern neovim.

Although in this case I think a macro would probably be what I would settle on. This macro would look like:

    ^wdw/the<ret>wvawpwciwkey<esc>j (<ret> and <esc> are ^M and ^[ but I replaced them to avoid confusion)

But these are already the motions you would need to use to keep the multiple cursors in alignment. The thing is though that if you screw up it's usually easier to unscrew yourself when it's just one line than when you've gone ahead and screwed up 20 times. Yes it's still just an undo but when I've used multiple cursors, especially when you're trying to break up lines, you're forced to deal with that breaking up happening in all cursors. Things quickly get overwhelming.

Multiple cursors are effectively (in my experience) just macro recording with automatic playback simultaneously at all the positions you care about. Whereas if you just record a macro and apply it wherever you would otherwise place your cursors, you get the same result without having the visual mess of dealing with multiple cursors. And it's just as error prone as macros.