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I've been working in Sublime Text 2 on my own time to learn web development. Now I'm laying out another book in InDesign and just dreaming of having some of Sublime Text 2's workflow. Does anyone know if there are any extensions / plug-ins that offer this? Particularly the ability to select a segment of text, instantly select all instances of it, and edit them all simultaneously IN COLUMN as opposed to the very tedious find and replace functionality.

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  • Can you keep the text as a separate file editable in Sublime, then just import/link to it via InDesign?
    – DA01
    Nov 16, 2012 at 17:36
  • Not for what I'm doing because its a 3 column directory (think phone book) and if a company name drops to the next line I have to go through and find a way to fix it, typically removing ", Inc." or abbreviating part of the name like "Association" to "Assn." We don't use a monospace font so counting characters to try and automate it wouldn't really help.
    – Ryan
    Nov 16, 2012 at 17:55

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I don't know of any extensions that solve this problem. I've always wished there was a backdoor to InD's markup where you could perform edits in a structured way -- obviously, at your own risk ;)

Scripting may provide a little productivity boost for you -- though not as elegant as what you seek. A javascript could grab your selection, ask for your edits, then run the search for you with predefined options. Assign it a keystroke and it's starting to feel almost native! The kind folks over at the InDesign Scripting forum could probably give you a jump start.

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The short but unhappy answer is "No," but @plainclothes suggestion to check in with the ID scripting forum is a good one. I'd add that this would be a good item to submit as a feature request to Adobe. Chris Kitchener, the ID Product Manager really does read every single bug report and feature request. It helps the InDesign team pitch the feature to management (and marketing!) if you give a detailed description of the workflow.

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