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Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal

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Re: Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal

#51

Post by rvz »

There was another comment about the difficulty in installing scooter and in the issues section, there are some requests to add more installation options.

https://github.com/thomasschafer/scooter/issues/6

Not everyone has the Rust toolchain installed on their machine. The `cargo install` installation directive needs to be discouraged.

Re: Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal

#54

Post by mananaysiempre »

mway wrote: post #48
jmercouris wrote: post #47

Feels like we just keep making tools that already exist in Emacs.

I dunno, seems reasonable to me that we might have nice things without requiring everyone to use emacs. (And for those who do use emacs, I guess you're ahead of the curve?)

On the other hand, it seems reasonable that we should be able to have nice things without giving up our editors. I know I’ve been spoiled by Kakoune’s cursors, but this feels like a tool that should work by spawning $EDITOR in the middle of its execution (or perhaps just having two phases and a control file). I don’t know if that’s actually possible with the current capabilities of $EDITORs (which are not Emacs). I just feel, in the darkest hour of the night which I spend reflecting on UIs, like it should be.

Re: Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal

#58

Post by sriram_malhar »

You get all this and more with a direct perl one liner. Without the interactivity. I'd argue that if it is a lot of files, interactivity would be a pain. Also, since the original is preserved as a .bak file, one can be fearless about trying

   #change xxx to yyy in all html
   bash> perl -pi.bak -e 's/xxx/yyy/g' *.html

   #change xxx10 (say) to yyy10 in all html
   bash> perl -pi.bak -e 's/xxx(\d+)/yyy$1/g' *.html

   # Change x4 to yyyy, where the number of y's equals to the number after x.
   bash> perl -pi.bak -e 's/x(\d+)/"y" x $1/ge' *.
The last example shows the /e operator, which evaluates an expression and uses the result as substitute, instead of a simple string.

And finally, to exclude files, one can use a subshell. For example, suppose you want to change all html, but exclude undesirable.html..

   perl -pi.bak -e 's/x/y/g'  $(ls *.html | egrep -v undesirable)

Re: Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal

#59

Post by CGamesPlay »

Since we're all giving replacements to this, nobody's mentioned my preferred one, so: use git add's patch mode. On a clean worktree, do the search/replace in bulk. Then use `git add --patch` to selectively add the good replacements and skip the bad ones. Finally, `git checkout -- .` to throw away all the bad ones. The nice part about this is that it's not much to remember. If you can make a global search and replace, and you can use `git add --patch` (which is useful loads of times), you can do a selective search and replace by combining them.

As far as this actual tool: the demo GIF is way too fast-paced to show what's going on. A better demo would maybe search "ring", have 10 or so results instead of pages and pages, and show how you can unselect "spring" matches which were unintentionally caught.

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