The first part of the article is true; gap buffers are not a data structure particularly optimized for multiple cursor edits. The conclusion is ridiculous. Of course you can provoke noticeable slowdown by doing an edit with thousands of cursors, but most people are doing small edits to small files, so the cost of the memmove operations is probably in the microseconds per cursor range. If multiple cursors feel intuitive to use and gives immediate visual feedback, why shouldn't people use them?
I say this as someone who has chosen a more sophisticated data structure (ropes) in the editor I'm working on.
I say this as someone who has chosen a more sophisticated data structure (ropes) in the editor I'm working on.