s.el VS visual-regexp.el

String manipulation (the sort of stuff included in the s.el ELisp library);

We will mainly look at 3 packages: s.el, f.el and dash.el. Two of these packages (first and last) are maintained by Magnar Sveen, who are also known for Emacs Rocks and What The .emacs.d (which are still great resources for learning and finding inspiration for your Emacs configuration!). We will also look at ht.el. These packages are used a lot in many of the Emacs packages you use in a day to day basis, like lsp-mode and rustic just to name a few. As most of these already have tons of examples in their READMEs, my main goal of this article is to inspire you to check them out. Hopefully you will know of one new package after reading this article :)

https://github.com/magnars/s.el (available on MELPA)

https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp.el is a package you might want. Doing things starting with : is an evil thing, so if you want to do things that way you’ll have to fiddle with that.

Maybe this? https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp.el

As others have said, this question crops up regularly. My take is: Just learn the syntax. People don't want to, but I don't believe it's actually difficult to remember. Use re-builder and I'd suggest using https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp.el for feedback, and just spend a bit of time learning, and the entire problem just goes away.

I have not tried the multiple cursors package, but regarding the problem of manipulating several lines at once with instant preview, you could look at the visual-regexp package:

https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp.el

I use visual-regexp-steroids to allow searching and replacing with alternative syntaxes (specifically, PCRE). It really makes the experience better along with visual-regexp itself.

I use the package visual-regexp for search and replace. I don't like how the line for the current replacement decision is not centered.

There is also https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp.el which kind of do the same thing.