PyCharm: Turning selection to multiple cursors per line

From source:

To add carets, do one of the following

• Press Shift+Alt and click the LEFT mouse button at the location of the caret.

• Double-click Ctrl and press up arrow or down arrow keys.

On OSX it seems to be enough to press down the LEFT-ALT and add new carets with mouse LEFT CLICK, or press down SHIFT+ALT and paint the cursors with mouse.

Hold Alt and drag the mouse over the desired text.

Source: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/2016.1/selecting-text-in-the-editor.html

Another option: with text selected, toggle column selection mode:

The default shortcut to toggle the mode is:

• Linux/Windows: alt-shift-insert
• Mac cmd-shift-(numpad) *

(or Edit→Column Selection Mode)

It's an inconvenient shortcut for Mac, as most laptops have no numpad. I remapped it to cmd-shift-8.

Column selection mode actually has other purposes too: it changes the default behavour when selecting text with the keyboard and mouse. Toggle it off again to return to normal selection behaviour.