Far – Sublime Inspired Find and Replace | Hacker News Reader

Far – Sublime Inspired Find and Replace

github.com

45 pointsweinzierl21 comments

There is another Far, with a bit more history behind it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager

Man, I remember the first time I came across Far Manager. It was through ConEmu in 2010. I was pretty confused with Far tbh. Couldn’t really figure out who or why you would use it. Then I saw someone actually using it at work.

The Wiki doesn’t go much into the demographic for such file manager. It does say they predate GUI file managers, which is fair I guess, but I always thought you lived by cd/ls/find/cat/etc then. I still do for the most part.

Far is a Norton Commander clone, and the NC was ubiquitous in pre-Windows era. It felt like it was on every single machine that ran DOS. Its dual-panel design is really quite ingenious as it speeds up the majority of routine file operations, especially when working with ad-hoc file sets. Just need to learn the keyboard shortcuts :)

Far is for Windows, where "find" and "cat" are problematic, to say the very least.

In that area, Far is game-changing.

And even today I use Midnight Commander in Linux because I used to Norton/Volkov Commander and then Far. ;)

Far manager now exists on Linux and Mac: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

I got it from nixpkgs, not sure if it's easy to install otherwise.

The FAQ doesn’t say so anyone know how this is better than [RPL](https://linux.die.net/man/1/rpl) (which I’ve used for years)?

I’d never heard of this! What a great tool.

The original upon which this is based: http://www.laffeycomputer.com/rpl.html

I appreciate the submission, but wish it had a lot more context given (e.g. in a blog post). For example, for someone who hasn't used find and replace in Sublime, how is it different than find and replace available in most text editors? How is this different than sed?

> How is this different than sed?

Less powerful but easier to use for simple cases?

README says `--tartget` - is that really the flag? Or is it supposed to say `target`?

It's a typo. From the source code, it's spelled "target"

Obvious question: how is this better than `perl -p -i -e s/Foo/Bar/g src/*/*.rs`?

I can understand the example in the repo just from reading it. Without the context I would have had no idea what posted is search and replace. So it’s got that going for it.

The example in the repo is `far --find "Foo" --replace "Bar" --tartget "./src/*/*.rs"`. If the value here is to not know how to use a regex, that's not very compelling

For you, perhaps.

Less slashes and parameters

I appreciate the willpower to not call this fart.

Depending on the interface you prefer, there are also

https://github.com/ms-jpq/sad https://github.com/chmln/sd

that haven't been mentioned yet

I use fastmod[1] and enjoy it

[1]: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod

RUST.

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