Show HN: Massren – multi-rename tool using your text editor | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Massren – multi-rename tool using your text editor

github.com

61 pointslaurent12345642 comments

This is awesome! Really great work. I can think of about five different instances in the last couple weeks where this could've really helped me out. Oftentimes, I ended up just using something like NameMangler[1] instead and pining for the flexibility of my editor.

For the other commenters in this thread that don't see the appeal or keep comparing it to other alternatives, here's what's so compelling to me:

- Editor agnostic. This isn't just for vim, people. ST2 is awesome for this kind of thing.

- Undo. Easy undo. That's a killer feature, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's unique to this tool.

Effusive praise aside, I ran into a couple small issues on OS X:

    $ massren --config editor 'subl'
    massren: Config has been changed: "editor" = "subl"
    $ massren
    massren: exec: "subl": executable file not found in $PATH

subl is indeed in my $PATH, but it's actually just a symlink to the ST2 application directory, as the ST2 docs suggest [2]. I solved this by just adding the app directory to my $PATH, but it'd be nice to keep it out of there if possible.

Also, I'd like to be able to pass switches along with my editor command, like git config's core.editor [3]. However, this doesn't seem to work:

    massren: exec: "subl -wn": executable file not found in $PATH

Anyway, great work once again, and thanks for releasing such a cool tool!

[1] http://manytricks.com/namemangler/

[2] http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html

[3] https://help.github.com/articles/using-sublime-text-2-as-you...

Thanks for the feedback! I would have expected Go to find the subl executable if it's in the PATH, even if it's a symlink but apparently not. I will check if this can be improved.

At the moment, the tool indeed doesn't support parameters for the text editor, though it's quite trivial to implement. I'm going to add this soon.

At a quick thought, is there any chance that 'subl' is actually an OS X alias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_%28Mac_OS%29) (which can't easily be followed from the command line), rather than a symlink?

Emacs users can use wdired in a dired buffer instead.

M-x wdired-change-to-wdired-mode

(not to spoil the fun of creating a useful command-line tool with Issue9 ;)

Yep, and wdired does a few more things as well. From its commentary:

- To move files to another directory (by typing their path, absolute or relative, as a part of the new filename).

- To change the target of symbolic links.

- To change the permission bits of the filenames (in systems with a working unix-alike `dired-chmod-program'). [...]

- To mark files for deletion, by deleting their whole filename.

Sorry, but what is Issue9?

Looks like it's a Go joke/shot: https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9

You should also have a look 'vidir' from Joey Hess' moreutils [1]. I think it is very similar.

Moretutils also includes 'vipe' (edit pipe in text editor) and other useful utilities.

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

My thoughts exactly. I doubt I go more than two hours without using something from moreutils.

Thanks for this. I've been using rename[1] (not actually from [2]) from time to time, but I find it is annoying beyond the simplest of cases (eg: change names to all lowercase).

vidir will probably serve me better.

[1] A utility that is distributed with perl (on Debian as /usr/bin/prename, with a listing in /etc/alternatives for "rename")

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Util-linux

Smart :-)

Since "wget https://raw.github.com/laurent22/massren/master/install/inst... comes out with certification error, because wget doesn't know github's certification, you need to either add an ignore-cert option or you might wanna change that option to 'curl -O https://raw.github.com/laurent22/massren/master/install/inst... which will not came out with an error. Also, curl is installed by default on MacOSX while wget is not :-)

Cheers!

Thanks! I've updated the command lines to use curl instead of wget.

This is cool. There is already a command called rename[1] that can do some of this but this is much more interactive (and probably more intuitive for vi users). Is this scriptable?

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename

Thanks, actually I've started developing massren after having tried `rename`, after I realized I had no idea what flavor of regex and syntax I was supposed to be using :) The advantage of using one's own text editor is that it's always familiar.

Currently, the command is not really scriptable, but I'd be open to any suggestion.

I think the syntax is pcrepattern[1] though I may very well be wrong. I definitely agree to the strength being that you know your editor.

I suppose scripting would be hard to do without knowing the editor. I artificially applied vim as the editor because that was what you used in the example. I very recently found vimcat[2] from another thread and thought that something similar could be done with this. I guess it may not be much more effective than just using sed and a for loop in <insert shell here> though.

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/3/pcrepattern [2] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4325

There is a vim plugin: rename.vim [1] which basically do the same job but without go dependency.

[1] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1721

Indeed it looks like it's doing something very similar, I didn't know about it. I guess one advantage of massren is that it can work with any text editor. The demo is with vim but, for example, on my machine I've set it up to use Sublime Text.

FWIW there is no Go 'dependency' unless you want to build from source.

Admittedly if there's no binary available for your platform then you need to build from source.

How is this different from qmv? http://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/renameutils

I'm not familiar with qmv so I cannot tell but, if it's Linux-only, then one advantage of massren is that it can work on any platform supported by Go (currently tested on Windows, OSX and Ubuntu).

No, of course renameutils is not specific to Linux Why do you assume that? You can get it from MacPorts or Homebrew for OS X and cygwin for Windows.

Does qmv support undo?

Would be great if someone could add it to homebrew. [0]

[0] http://brew.sh/

I would also like to be able to brew install this.

I've just submitted the homebrew package, let's see if they accept it - https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/26819

Nice work!

holy crap, it has an --undo switch!

Why don't more commands have this?

Nice catch!

Yeah I was impressed, I dug into the code a little to see how they accomplish this. They store a sqlite database in ~/.config/massren that contains the rename history and other configuration options. Pretty slick! The app is written in very readable Go.

That's a nice feature to have. I would say that "undo" really should be something in the filesystem, though. Like with nilfs2:

http://www.nilfs.org/en/about_nilfs.html

Came here to suggest this as a feature. Was pleasantly surprised.

It seems like there is a neat thing that could be done with this sort of thing + id3 tags.

One program I missed when I moved from Windows to Linux was Freename - http://freename.sourceforge.net/ - which does exactly this.

My solution was a bit hackier, a bash script that did spit out a bunch of lines for each file in a directory, each with "(mv|cp) 'foo.bar' ''", ready for me to edit and then paste back into a terminal window.

Great tool.

This wasn't clear from the README, but this will work with files across directories (which is both useful and confusing)

massren /*foo.rb

Will rename matching files in different directories, but there is no indication of what directories those are in the editor.

<snark>Also, how could you build something so useful without generics!?</snark>

I wrote a hack that uses sed to rename files and I've been pretty happy with it despite its simplicity.

https://github.com/everett1992/utils/blob/master/sed-utils/m...

Hmm should I look into getting this on homebrew? Would anyone other than me be interested?

NameChanger is another great tool that helps with this family of tasks on OS X. http://www.mrrsoftware.com/MRRSoftware/NameChanger.html

Neat! Were you inspired somewhat by Git's interactive rebase or something similar?

Yes! I think the interface of rebase is great. There are probably other similar "complex" operations that can be simplified by opening a text editor.

It looks like there are lots of implementations of this idea or there. Here's mine in 30 lines of bash:

http://dnr.im/tech/articles/mvdir/

You might also consider checking for the environment variable $EDITOR. It's defined by POSIX and there are existing tools that use it.

I have been using the tool 'vimv' for years now ... how is this different/worse/better ?

Perhaps the ability to define any editor ?

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