Good Tools Are Invisible

> I didn't say that either nor even imply it, and you know that when you quote me afterwards.

You come across that way when you describe your interactions with Vim users talking about how they use macros. (Which, incidentally, doesn't match my experience at all.) More importantly, your comparison of "Vim users do this with macros" to "I could do this with (proper) multiple cursors" doesn't seem apt.

Perhaps it could possibly make sense if we had at least one concrete example of "this"; but the most obvious thing to do with multiple cursors is patterned editing of multiple matching text fragments, and Vim users would (or I would, at least) normally do that with a /g regex. To the extent that macro is useful, it's because multiple changes are done (such that the dot command wouldn't help), and if that's too complex to do easily with regex then I can't imagine that the simultaneous changes with multiple cursors could actually get it right anyway.

More importantly, though: the real point of a macro is that, having recorded it, you can persist it even across editing sessions. You also mentioned the possibility of writing a script; a macro is that, just in a very small, focused language.

> A lot of people, including younger myself, got into Linux and Android BECAUSE it was configurable and customizable. And even played around with all of the customizations because it was fun to do. But it didn't really make my general experience better because I was forever trying to correct something I should have to correct in the first place.

This doesn't match my experience at all. I play around with customizations because I understand that the default couldn't possibly have anticipated what I wanted. But more importantly: I use multiple user accounts on my system (all for myself; I did this on Windows too) and what I appreciate about Linux is that I can duplicate configuration files instead of having to navigate through UIs again and click a ton of options (perhaps following notes on what to click; I never descended to the AutoHotKey level of madness, though).

> but vim macros are an interactive scripting language specifically designed to tersely express text transformations

Yes, I think this is important here. Although it's still hard for me to imagine a level of mastery where one deliberately "writes" macros (what, directly in the vimrc?) as opposed to recording them. Perhaps it's within my grasp to optimize them later, but.

All that said, there are quite a few things I don't like about Vim even though the overall editing model clicks with me, and ideas I've had for something I'd like better. Although I guess I really should check out alternatives before running my mouth about that…

> I'd love a way that isn't miserable to do such a common basic task.

The problem is that you actually describe a family of tasks which is not basic. The "iterate over files, select the right ones and apply rules to rename them" part is common; the problem is that the rules vary broadly in kind and complexity, and you haven't figured out how you want to specify them (some ways will be limited in the complexity they can handle.

(Usually the selection of files is trivial; when not, we can fold that complexity into the change rules, and emit null changes in some cases.)

If your selection rule is simple enough for Bash globbing, and your per-file rename rule is simple enough for, say `tr` to handle, then that's trivial to wrap up as a Bash script (or function). In fact, you could write the Python script such that it just accepts a single input filename and outputs the changed version, and handle the rest externally.

> I've never used Emacs. I tried vi(m) nonconsensually and had to google how to exit. A while later, I tried it intentionally and hkjl navigation didn't work because I use a custom keyboard layout, so I never touched it again. Sublime Text and its many cursors for the win!

I'm not really clear on how text editors are supposed to be relevant to batch file renaming. If trying vi(m) the first time wasn't your idea, then there should have been someone else around responsible for guiding you through it. But the variations I've tried had arrow-key navigation configured by default (and `vimtutor` explicitly tells you that it should also work); you really don't have to learn hjkl, which exists largely for a combination of historical reasons with a lot of back-filled justifications. (I would have used ijkl, mimicking an arrow-key layout.) And everything can be remapped in the config files.

>Keyboards require learning

We are not talking about keyboard shortcuts (key combinations that you press to do something) by the way, and about the actual typing of commands in the terminal/shell/repl what ever...

Java implementations sometimes take part of the name from the interface they implement, for example, `FooRunner` probably implements `Runner`. My example was that I renamed `Runner` to whatever, `Executor`, and IntelliJ will ask me if I want to rename also implementations (in this case, it would show `FooRunner` -> `FooExecutor`).