I really like advance find and replace in kate editor. You can optionally use regex and operate on multiple files.
Very importantly it has a robust preview changes ability. it is comfortable to use even with lots of hits, lots of files. So you do not need to apply a bunch of changes and hope you considered every permutation as with a cli tool like sed.
One thing that would really improve my life would be a tool like this which allows you to save search queries and options.
Don't work for me:
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Kate has a popup for history in the fields which is somewhat helpful but limited. When trying out different queries you don't have a way to remember which one actually worked so going by the history just ends in repeating the same errors over and over. Also it doesn't match the "find" and "replace" fields nor does it associate them with the other options like directory, etc.
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Keeping notes in a text file is of course possible but cumbersome. I would like the computer to do work like that for me.
For single file searches regex101.com (non floss) and regexr.com (GPLv3) are great in-browser tools for learning and you can save the search. But to operate locally on many files, it doesn't work.
Does anyone know any tools that do anything like this? Can find various utilities which operate on file names but I am looking for file content. Certainly this exists ya?
(Post image is screenshot from Kate website of Kate on windows.)
Oh the whole previewing of changes thing, I guess I'd probably just use
git, to easily roll back.I've tried it a couple times and can work in some contexts but becomes overly-complex in others. Example, if your fileset is not easily constrained by a single
gitrepo. e.g. if there are multiple repos already existing. Or there are submodules. Or there are repos that have ignore files, but you want to include the files in the changes. Or there are a lot of files that chokegit.Plus it doesn't really facilitate showing the changes that easily. I guess then you immediately go look at it with a diff tool and try to ascertain if it is screwed up or not? The kate component is nice because it shows you a list of changed files by filename/location, which you can expand to lines, and which you can easily open the whole file. Highlights the matches. Very quickly flick though everything for manual error checking. I haven't been able to find any diff tool that is as easy to use. (Would love to learn of one.)
And it still doesn't address the whole concept of saving the query.. I guess if you would write an individual bash script for every query? Then have a directory of those to somehow riffle through when needed?
All this sounds like something a computer would be great at managing but I am shit at managing.
Why not run sed and pipe to diff to preview changes?
You'd still have to manually copy out the command line to a notes file, but I don't think that that's too terrible. You could use a terminal-integrated snippets palette to make it a little smoother.
I'm not aware of any program that does exactly everything you want it to, so you might write your own or extend an existing one, as mentioned.