The question is not to have multiple gaps (although that would actually be
useful for some extensions like multiple-cursors (which btw is pretty nice
and emacs is the only editor to support that)),
I think I might misunderstand you, because, if I recall correctly, Emacs' multiple-cursor support is a port of the concept from Atom, which borrowed it from Sublime Text. In any case, at this point multiple-cursor support (perhaps under varying names) exists in several commonly used editors, including gedit and vscode.
On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 5:21 AM Richard Stallman <
rms@gnu.org> wrote:
In principle there might be a more efficient representation of
buffers. But I am skeptical about that. When I tried to look for a
better representation that would allow for multiple gaps, I couldn't
see a good answer about how to use them and gain any benefits.
It's been a few years since I last looked at this, but if anyone is {seriously,academically} interested in changing Emacs' underlying buffer representation, I recommend looking closely at ropes:
I've been away from these academic circles for a while now, so it's possible that this recommendation is out of date; I would love to see (a pointer to) an update if anyone has such a thing.
Hope this helps,
~Chad