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It needs to be graphical. No sed, awk, grep, perl, whatever. I know how to use those and I do use them now, but I need to cherry-pick each replace in 300+ files.

I want a tool where I can:

  • type a search string
  • type a replace string
  • select a directory and file extension

and it would recursively go into each file in that directory and its sub-directories, open it and scroll to the place where search string is and offer two options:

  • replace (and find next)
  • find next

Nothing more. Reg.exp. support is a plus, but not required.

SOLVED: Regexxer is exactly what I needed. In case someone needs it on Slackware, here's what you need to download and how to compile it (choosing correct version of each dependency can be a PITA)

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  • Latest 0.10 source version from year 2011 with 8 downloads/week: regexxer.sourceforge.net sourceforge.net/projects/regexxer . Also available in Ubuntu based Linux distributions as installable package. Commented Nov 13, 2023 at 13:33

7 Answers 7

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30

I think regexxer is exactly what you're looking for:

Regexxer

regexxer is a nifty GUI search/replace tool featuring Perl-style regular expressions. If you need project-wide substitution and you’re tired of hacking sed command lines together, then you should definitely give it a try.

See also the screenshot, looks a lot like what you're describing:

screenshot

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4 Comments

I would vote this down but do not have enough points to do that. regexxer does not have a multi-line search field which and therefor can only search and replace a single line. The jedit tool handles search and replace of multi-line text and is therefor a much better solution.
Agree with Farrukh, see his answer and upvote please: stackoverflow.com/a/189356/721073
JEdit is much more user friendly.
Warning because Regexxer is quite outdated. Cannot install it. I guess it is not for new distribution in 2022
8

Emacs + dired + query-replace-regexp

For complete recipe follow this link (it's rather long, covering all possible alternatives),

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2 Comments

I've used this in Emacs, and it's awesome. It does exactly what the OP wants.
Although I like Regexxer better, I'll vote you up because it is a valid solution. Thanks.
7

jEdit does exactly what you need. It is written in Java and works well in Linux, Windows and OS X (probably other operating systems also).

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5 Comments

Interesting. I used jEdit 3-4 years ago, but don't remember that feature. Is is available via some add-on? Or maybe it was added in the meantime...
I don't know how long it's been there, but the text search dialog box allows searching for regex matches, and you can search all open files or a whole directory if you like.
SStrangely, the linux version of jedit doesn't have the multiline text area in the search and replace window (version 4.2final)
The jedit solution is the only one I have found that handles multi-line search and replace across multiiple files. The regexxer tool does not handle multi-lines in my experience. jedit on ubuntu linux indeed does have a multi-line text area using Search / Search In Directory menu action. This response should have the highest points but does not for some reason while the response with highest points (regexxer) does not support multi-line search.
jedit is user friendly. The other tools don't seem to be at all of a step up from bash so what's the point
6

Lately Kate (if you use KDE) can do it, but in a very tricky way. Go to "Edit>Search in Files", and choose the folder within which your files exist.

The trick is that only after the search results appear, you will find a text box and a button called "Replace checked". This button will do what you want.

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2 Comments

This is only available if you activate Kate's Search & Replace plugin.
This is the best solution for me since I am a KDE user. But no worries because lately the Kate Editor is a cross-platform application. And it also supports find and replace plugin out ouf the box. However I think any decent code editor like VSCode or Atom nowadays should have the same feature.
3

I use gVim for this task all the time. I open up all the files at once, then use the commands to perform a subsitution on each file, asking for confirmation. Generally I use < 20 files, so I open them as tabs and use this:

:tabdo %s/foo/bar/gc

gVim works fine on Windows :) My coworkers often use Textpad to do this same thing, but I'd say gVim is much more efficient at it.

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2 Comments

bufdo works on buffers instead of tabs, which is pretty useful. Any way to get it to automatically save the files as it goes through buffers?
I'm not sure about saving as it goes, but you can save all of them at once when it's done with ":wa". You could also do ":tabdo :w", I think, but I see no point to it. And of course you could use buffers :).
2

If you are a KDE user there's also kfilereplace.

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1

jdReplace

Can handle very large amount of files. Easy to use, fast, and its repository is with the strong privacy and strong security Codeberg.

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