Interactive Simultaneous Editing of Multiple Text Regions

Simultaneous editing is a new method for automating repetitive text editing. After describing a set of regions to edit (the records), the user can edit any one record and see equivalent edits applied simultaneously to all other records. The essence of simultaneous editing is generalizing the user’s selection in one record to equivalent selections in the other records. We describe a generalization method that is fast (suitable for interactive use), domain-specific (capable of using high-level knowledge such as Java and HTML syntax), and under user control (generalizations can be corrected or overridden). Simultaneous editing is useful for source code editing, HTML editing, and scripting, as well as many other applications.