Perhaps it’s changed since the last time I used it, but I do strongly recall it adding multiple cursors with regular n. Those cursors might not have been “live” for editing, but they were still there to distract me.
That's probably because you confused Vim and Kakoune key bindings.
Kakoune
- n: next match
- alt+n: previous match
- shift+movement: extend selection by movement
Vim
- n: next
- shift+N: previous match
So if you press shift+N as you are used from vim, you start adding a lot of selections instead of going to previous match. I believe this difference is the most confusing for people who switch from Vim to Kakoune.
Nothing I can find about that in the changelog, but it’s possible. (Side note: “Development version: <a-u> and <a-U> now undo selection history.” Finally.)
My normal workflow these days is select first match with /, then N to accept match and continue to the next one or n to reject and continue; then edit all at once. (For me, the principal advantage of this over standard find-and-replace is that the edit doesn’t need to be restricted to the inside of the occurrence—for a bulk code edit, I often can’t quickly write a regexp for what I need to modify but can write one for something predictably close to it.)
Now that I’m thinking about it, your preferred workflow of confirming each replacement separately can be replicated like this for literals: use / to select first match, then Q, c, enter replacement, <esc>, Q. Then n to go to second match, q if you want to replace, n for third match, etc. (Here Q starts then ends recording a keyboard macro, q plays it back.) More complex replacements and regexp groups will be trickier but possible. (E.g. for s/whatever/before&after/ set up the replacement with /, whatever, <enter>, Q, i, before, <esc>, a, after, <esc>, Q.)
And now I’ve changed my mind on keyboard macros which I had thought were a silly feature for Kakoune. Hah.
