Don’t you hate it when you need to rename something in lots of places? AppCode has great refactoring tools to help us rename properties, classes and methods. But sometimes we might want to rename something that also appears in a comment, or we might have made a spelling mistake in more than one place, or we might want to change a value in multiple places.
Individually changing and manually typing each piece of text can be quite irritating, and slow. We can sometimes speed the process up by copying and pasting, but there’s another way. AppCode supports editing using multiple cursor simultaneously.
I tend to organise my unit tests into sections by the method that is being tested. In the example below I am testing a method called setFontStyleBuilder . Each test method is named test_ followed by the name of the method, followed by a description of the behaviour.
When I refactor a method name I risk the MARK: comment and the test method declaration becoming out of sync with the code. Isolating the method name inside the test method declaration is tricky and makes copy and pasting harder I would like so instead I use multiple cursors.
Use ⌥⇧ click to add another cursor to your editor; make your changes; and then use esc to finish.
Sometimes the things we want to change are on adjacent lines. In which case we can use turn on column mode ⌘⇧8 and then holding shift ⇧ use the arrow keys to make a selection. Don’t forget to turn column mode off again when you’re finished using ⌘⇧8 .
Handy for when you’ve forgotten to make your properties private too.
You can even get crazy and copy and paste during your selection.
Happy coding!
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