Multiple Cursors

[bemiller]

The ability to have multiple cursors would be a huge improvment. Many other editors have this option (specifically Rstudio and Sublime) and adding it to SAS would bring a lot of people back to SAS as their main editor. The uses for this feature are nearly infinite!

[paulkaefer]

I hadn't heard about this until you posted the idea. After reading more here, this does sound like something that would be really useful. It's great to double-click a variable and see highlighted all occurrences, and this would take that one step further.

[Quentin]

Can you say a bit more about how this is useful? I read the link to the Rstudio example, but not really seeing the benefit of this over find & replace to replace all occurences.  I can't remember a time I've wanted to type in two lines at once, with the possible exception of something like drawing a "comment box" or some other ASCII art.  But I'm sure I'm just not imagining the possibilities.

[Casey_SAS]

Thanks for the suggestion - we are reviewing this request for inclusion into a future release.

[emilbebri]

it's 2018 and last year, this was still "under consideration" in SAS. Every decent editor have had this feature for at least 3 years, jesus. No wonder SAS is going down the drain!

[CaseySmith]

Hi @emilbebri,

I agree that "multiple cursors/selections" is a neat feature.  SAS Studio has had this feature for several releases.  

Ctrl+Click to add additional cursors or Ctrl+Select to create multiple selections with separate cursors.  For example:

In addition, SAS Studio has a "column select" feature that allows you to Alt+LeftMouse+Drag to select a column of text, which you can then edit, applying your edits to each selection via multiple cursors:

We would love to add multiple cursors to the SAS Enterprise Guide editor as well, and we are considering it for a future release, but so far it hasn't risen above higher priorities.

Right now, you can usually accomplish the same end result (granted with a few more clicks) with Smart Highlighting and Find/Replace in SAS Enterprise Guide.  For example:

We also realize that there will always be some users that prefer editors other than ours, so we made it convenient in SAS Enterprise Guide to open external .sas programs in your preferred editor (associated application in Windows):

For example, if desired, you could associate .sas files in Windows with Sublime, Notepad++, or any other text editor.  Then when you click Open with Windows Default in EG, the file would open in your preferred editor.  This would allow you to edit the file in your preferred editor, but still have it picked up by EG for execution, building flows, etc.

We will certainly post back if/when we make progress on multiple cursors in SAS Enterprise Guide.  In the meantime, if it is a critical feature, try SAS Studio or EG's Open with Windows Default.

Thanks for your feedback.

Casey

[Apollo1123]

Disgruntled, reluctant SAS user here. Multi-cursor and macro/function introspection should be standard. Even Notepad++ has multicursor. I expect more from an editor taking 0.5-1gb RAM!

I also wish SAS editors could identify where macros are defined too (expected in most IDEs). The data results should also appear together with the code (like MSSQL). The tabbed data view leads to constant clicking.

[Quentin]

Thanks @CaseySmith for the animation of Studio in action.  Very cool to see.  EG has come a long way from it's origins as almost purely a "point and click" user interface to supporting programmer needs.  There is of course no perfect editor.  Plenty of folks still complain about features the PC SAS enhanced editor lost.  Good to know that EG will continue to evolve.

[ChrisNZ]

Alt+LeftMouse+Drag  in SAS Studio moves the browser window, rather than select a column. Any way to change that?

> EG has come a long way from it's origins as almost purely a "point and click" user interface to supporting programmer needs. 

Not really. It is still primarily a tool for non-programmers, which had been shoved down the throat of programmers despite its many shortcomings, purely for licensing reasons.