sublime text select first in each line

Question

In Vim there's a really nice feature to find/replace the first occurrence in each line. This is afaik actually the default behavior. How can I obtain the same behavior in sublime text?

I need to be able to mark/find the FIRST (and the first only!) character, e.g. '=', in each line, so that I easily can mark/copy/cut what's before and what's after that specific character. Mind you, there might be many of this specific character in each line.

Concrete example:

I have a long list of java properties in the form:

my.property.link1=<a href="asdfs">Link 1</a>
my.property.link22=<a href="asdfs">Link 22</a>
my.property.link333=<a href="asdfs">Link 333</a>
my.property.link4444=<a href="asdfs">Link 4444</a>

I want to mark the first "=" in each line, to be able to select all the preceding text (indifferent from the amount of text preceding the "=") to cut or copy the text. The paste-result of such action would be:

my.property.link1
my.property.link22
my.property.link333
my.property.link4444

Answer 1

I actually wrote a sublime plugin called SelectUntil that addresses this exact problem: https://github.com/xavi-/sublime-selectuntil

Once it's install you can do the following

• Select all the line you'd like edit or partially copy
• Press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + L -- this gives each line it's own cursor.
• Bring each cursor to the beginning of it's line by pressing Home or Ctrl + A if you're using OSX
• Press Ctrl/Alt + Shift + S to activate SelectUntil
• Tell SelectUntil to select until the equals sign by typing = + Enter
• Hit shift + ← to deselect the equals sign
• At this point the names of all the properties should be selected so you can copy/paste as you'd like

The experience should look something like this:

Answer 2

Supposing you have the following text:

my.property.link1=<a href="asdfs">Link 1</a>
my.property.link22=<a href="asdfs">Link 22</a>
my.property.link333=<a href="asdfs">Link 333</a>
my.property.link4444=<a href="asdfs">Link 4444</a>

Press Ctrl + F (or click Find->Find)

Enable regular expressions

Type in the search field: ^.*?(?==)

Preess Alt + Enter (or click Find All)

Now all the text before = is selected, you just need to copy it.