> For file management these days, Dired is my interface of choice. It is simply the more elegant tool for the job. Case in point: renaming a bunch of files in a directory to arbitrary names. With a shell, my standard approach would have been to run some variant of `ls -1 > foo.sh`, edit `foo.sh` to insert `mv` on each line to a renamed target file, `chmod u+x foo.sh` to be executable, run `foo.sh`, delete `foo.sh` and call it a day.

I used to do this before I discovered vidir. [1] vidir is not actually tied to vi; it lets you rename and delete files through your `$EDITOR`. You edit a temporary file that looks like this:

  ...
  0093<tab>./fstab
  0094<tab>./fuse.conf
  0095<tab>./fwupd
  ...

There is also https://github.com/bulletmark/edir designed to improve on vidir. I haven't used it yet.

I'll give Emacs another try some day, I swear, and Dired is one of the reasons.

Edit: [1] I linked to https://github.com/trapd00r/vidir here at first. That is a fork; vidir comes from https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/. You probably want the original. It is packaged for Debian, FreeBSD, Homebrew, etc. as part of the package `moreutils`.