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

[flagged]

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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."

I use Helix, which doesn't have find and replace built in!

Not affiliated, I just built a little tool to make my life easier and thought I'd share

Looks handy!

What's your workflow with vim?

I think it's cool. Thanks for sharing

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.

Cool.

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

That is very useful. What does it have to do with this?

It uses https://docs.rs/ignore/latest/ignore/ to walk dirs while respecting ignore files

If you want to search and replace a command line, there's tools to do it in your favourite editor.

Ah, so you didn't click through and actually see what this tool is, you just read the title.

I did click through, but misinterpreted what it was doing. Apologies, I'm "multitasking".

(And `ignore` uses `walkdir` internally)

For single threaded use cases. For multi-threaded, it has its own parallel directory traversal. :-)

Why not just ask politely instead?

Yes. It takes literally seconds, and is a single command on basically every platform.

If you're afraid of that - are you realistically going to be running a cli interactive find and replace?

If you want to package up an EXE for your specific system and host it somewhere - the license is MIT, go right ahead...

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

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!

> Yes

Thanks, not interested then

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

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

Perhaps. I as a fish user thought “oh, like `string replace`”

Can you please not post shallow dismissals of other people's work? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's important, when people share something they've made on HN, that they don't run into this sort of bilious internet putdown.

Edit - these are other examples of the same thing (i.e. the thing we don't want in HN threads, and which we'd appreciate if you'd not do any more of):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41810426

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224056

It's great and clearly the community appreciates it! I'll put Show HN in the title since that's the convention for sharing one's projects on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

Btw, do you want to include some text giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it? that's also the convention. If you post it in a reply to this comment, I'll move your text to the top of the thread.

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

In Emacs, there is [helm-ag-edit](https://github.com/emacsorphanage/helm-ag) (but uses ripgrep if present). It's almost identical to your workflow, but all done inside the same app.

1. helm-ag <pattern> # the search results are updated as you type 2. helm-ag-edit # edit the search result as regular text. Use multi-cursors, macros, whatever. 3. helm-ag-edit-save # commits the changes to the affected files

All those commands have keybindings, so it's pretty fast. I'll often open up Emacs just to do that and then go back to my JetBrains IDE.

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.

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.

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?)

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

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

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.

That was my first problem with trying to install this. But agree that it should be on Homebrew.

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

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.

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/

Couldn't find it in nixpkgs.

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

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)

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.

Nonsense, lots of people are doing text editors.

What is gum?

I opened a PR for it: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/356310

In the meantime you can also add packages that aren't yet in nixpkgs using pkgs.callPackage.

Something that frequently trips me up, mostly when helping colleagues, is the arguments to both find and xargs differ substantially between GNU and the FreeBSD-derived ones that ship on macOS.

Why use `xargs` instead of `-exec`? And if you do need `xargs` (for example, for parallel processing with `-P`), it is recommended to use `-print0` with `find` and `-0` with `xargs` to avoid issues due to filenames.

xargs passes many inputs to one script invocation, so even with a single thread there is often a dramatic speedup.

(and agree re -print0/-0, it's absolutely essential)

The problem is... if you use these on rare occasions it gets frustrating, because you have to read the manual or google everything or ask the llm again and again.

noone can remember these abbreviations

https://atuin.sh/ is such a huge productivity booster in these scenarios. I remember that I used find + xargs command sometime in the last 6 months on of my computers and with Atuin I can quickly find it and then slightly modify it to fit my current need.

it's a cool helper for shell scripts, do have beautiful interfaces, check it here https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

This looks great, good work.

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

`find` can do that as well with `{} +` (at least, the `GNU` implementation and it'll automatically add more invocations if there are just way too many files).

In any case, OP was using `-n1` which means one file per invocation.

Yeah it's great! Difficult to remember Bash pipelines are being replaced with modern tools with good UX.

be very careful with

    git checkout .

it will eat your changes changes if you yolo it.

You can save useful snippets in a file for later use.

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.

Pretty neat trick, I will definitely use it in the future

But it only works in git repositories. Sometimes you need to search and replace on non-git repositories, for those cases Scooter might be the answer

yes, but...

noone except your shell! Fish is perfect and very very often can guess what I want using pwd, file existence, current prompt, etc...

I tried this out, and nothing happened. Then I discovered that it has to be enabled first, for example by: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/34251/152147 Thanks for sharing, learnt something new :)

The `git gui` command is a nice-ish graphical alternative to `git add -p` and `git checkout` btw. You can even stage and discard individual lines. There are of course lots of other ones, but the TCL/Tk one is quite featureful.

This should only happen if you hit enter on the confirmation screen - was it not clear that this would happen? I'd rather not slow users down by making them confirm that they definitely want to perform the replacement, but I'm happy to hear about other ways to make it clear that a replacement is going to be performed

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)

I disagree, They are not difficult to remember.

you'll never build good UX and a powerful tool. You're either a master of your tool or you're not.