I like the Edit > Show all masters function, but it does nothing when several glyphs are selected in Text mode.
Any reason why it can’t function in such circumstances too? You’d have to choose whether the repetitions would happen after each glyph (c c c a a a t t t), or whether the whole selected string would repeat in the different masters (cat cat cat). Either way could be useful.
What if a long text is selected? And what if many instances are set? Like 40?
Performance issues are obvious. It would need to interpolate and render all these glyphs in all instances on the fly, possibly apply filters too. If you want to check the whole family, the obvious solution is the Adobe Fonts Folder or a Webfont export.
Having said that, I think I still have a plugin lying around that does exactly that, display all instances for the current word. I could update it but am somewhat reluctant because no one is going to use it because of the performance.
Are you talking about “Show all instances” in the preview pane? I’m talking about “Show all masters” in the editing pane.
I tried to script that with the current implementation but couldn’t get it to work. So this should be a feature request.