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

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.

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)

Very cool! I currently use `sad` for this, if you're already an fzf user you should check it out.

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

We're losing the art of bash ``` find -type f -iname '*.go' | xargs -r -n1 sed -i 's,foo,foobar,g' ```

Love this but also could never really stick to similar tools (codemod, fastmod..)

Main change I would need I think: to assume that if no replacement if provided, the user wants to edit each instance individually "inline" (or dropping into vim, not sure what works best - this model breaks once you want to swap lines, replace 1 word with multiple lines etc).

And ofc accept command line args for the initial search string (and optionally replacement) from command line so the first screen is skipped! (I think folder could be optional)

(I also tried to undo my changes after deleting words by accident but thats a hard ask! :D)

A Homebrew install option will help this take off on Macs. https://github.com/thomasschafer/scooter/issues/6

Cool.

I assumed it uses ripgrep (or the underlying walkdir) because that's the established high-performance tool for this. But apparently not.

Cool! is it possible to support structural search like ast-grep[1]? ast-grep has some interactive mode but it is nothing near Scooter.

1: https://ast-grep.github.io/

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.

Neat ... but I'd probably just do this by opening a "grep -l" list in nano for interactive replacement directly instead. Easy peasy.

Am I the only one who thought this could alsop work lik "just" a find tool, only to discover it silently erased that word from all files in the directory without asking for confirmation? This felt riskier than rm -rf.

This looks great, good work.

I’ve been using serpl lately, https://github.com/yassinebridi/serpl

nice! Find and replace across a codebase is one of the few times I open an IDE.

Being able to interactively ignore instances for replacement is great!

Similarly, on bash/ksh: set -o vi Ctrl-[ v (or ESC) set -o emacs Ctrl-x e

Am I alone in initially thinking this was specifically for the fish shell because of this tool's name?

You could also use vim in a loop. Say you want to replace "hello" in all files in the current dir with "world" and confirm every replace, then you would do:

    for f in $(grep -l 'hello' *); do vim -c ':%s/hello/world/gc | wq' "$f"; done

Or if you want to use some more vim magic, this simpler command will do the same:

    vim -c "argdo %s/hello/world/gce | update" -c "qall" *

"argdo" will do the replace command for each file, the additional e modifier in gce will ignore files that do not contain the search string and the second command "qall" is to quit vim after the work is done.

Very nice, it might be a good alternative when I can't use vscode remote connections.

Excellent, thank you. I do this with sed & awk & sometimes an IDE, and scooter looks better in every way.

I'm adding scooter to my cargo install favorites:

https://github.com/sixarm/cargo-install-favorites

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

A useful feature of bash and zsh is the "edit command". The standard shortcut is "ctrl-x ctrl-e".

It opens the current command line in $EDITOR, which often defaults to vim.

Looks handy!

Couldn't find it in nixpkgs.

Also see the excellent https://github.com/your-tools/ruplacer.

For more advanced needs, I have a custom thing called greprep that let's you make changes using your favorite editor. Workflow is like this:

  1. $ rg -n .... > /tmp/lines.txt
  2. (edit lines.txt in vscode)
  3. $ greprep /tmp/lines.txt to apply the changes

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I'm using this quickly put-together shell script called replace

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    
    # Function to escape special characters for sed
    escape_sed_string() {
        printf '%s\n' "$1" | gsed -e 's/[]\/$*.^[]/\\&/g'
    }
    
    help() {
      gum style --foreground cyan --italic "\
    Usage (everything optional, you will be prompted):\n\
    $0\n\
      --ext .js --ext .ts\n\
      --from \"source string\"\n\
      --to \"replacement string\"\n\
      --dir somePath"
    }
    
    # Parse command line arguments
    while [[ "$#" -gt 0 ]]; do
        case $1 in
            -h)
                help
                exit 0
                ;;
            --help)
                help
                exit 0
                ;;
            --ext) EXTENSIONS+=("$2"); shift ;;
            --from) REPLACE_FROM="$2"; shift ;;
            --to) REPLACE_TO="$2"; shift ;;
            --dir) DIRECTORY="$2"; shift ;;
            *) gum style --foreground red --bold "Unknown parameter: $1"; exit 1 ;;
        esac
        shift
    done
    
    # Check for missing parameters and prompt using gum
    if [ -z "${EXTENSIONS+set}" ]; then
        EXTENSIONS=($(gum choose \
            --no-limit \
            --selected .ts,.mts,.tsx,.vue,.js,.cjs,.mjs \
            .ts .mts .tsx .vue .js .cjs .mjs .txt .md .html .json))
    fi
    
    # Exit if no extension is selected
    if [ ${#EXTENSIONS[@]} -eq 0 ]; then
        gum style --foreground red --bold " Error: No extensions selected. Exiting."
        exit 1
    fi
    
    if [ -z "${REPLACE_FROM+set}" ]; then
        REPLACE_FROM=$(gum input --placeholder "Search string:")
        if [ -z "${REPLACE_FROM}" ]; then
            echo "No replace from string, exiting"
            exit 1
        fi
    fi
    if [ -z "${REPLACE_TO+set}" ]; then
        REPLACE_TO=$(gum input --placeholder "Replace string:")
    fi
    if [ -z "${DIRECTORY+set}" ]; then
        DIRECTORY="."
    fi
    
    # Escape strings for sed
    ESCAPED_FROM=$(escape_sed_string "$REPLACE_FROM")
    ESCAPED_TO=$(escape_sed_string "$REPLACE_TO")
    
    # Run the replacement
    for ext in "${EXTENSIONS[@]}"; do
        gum style --foreground blue " Replacing ${ext} files..."
        find "$DIRECTORY" -type f -name "*$ext" ! -path "*/node_modules/*" -exec gsed -i "s/$ESCAPED_FROM/$ESCAPED_TO/g" {} \;
    done
    
    gum style --foreground green --bold " Replacement complete."

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