total-rename

README

total-rename

Utility to rename occurences of a string in files in the correct casing — content and path!

Installation

Check the Releases section for binary downloads for your platform.

Alternatively, if you have Go installed and configured, you can use

go get github.com/jeffijoe/total-rename

Usage

total-rename - case-preserving renaming utility
Copyright © Jeff Hansen 2017 to present. All rights reserved.

OPTIONS:
    Options must be specified before arguments.

    --dry         If set, won't rename anything
    --binary      A | separated string of path segments where contents
                  should not be examined.
    --ignore      A | separated string of path segments to completely ignore
    --force       Replaces all occurences without asking
    --help        Shows this help text

ARGUMENTS:

    <pattern>  Search pattern (glob). Relative to working
               directory unless rooted (absolute path).
    <find>     The string to find. If multiple words,
               please use camelCase.
    <replace>  The string to replace occurences with.
               If multiple words, please use camelCase.

EXAMPLE:

    total-rename "**/*.txt" "awesome" "excellent"

    Rename all occurences of "awesome" to "excellent" in
    all .txt files (and folders) recursively from the
    current working directory:

EXAMPLE:

    total-rename --force "/Users/jeff/projects/my-app/src/**/*.*" "awesome" "excellent"

    Like the first example, but from an absolute path, and match all
    file extensions and don't ask for confirmation for each occurence.

EXAMPLE:

    total-rename --ignore ".git/|dist/" --binary ".jpg|.jpeg|.png" "/Users/jeff/projects/my-app/src/**/*.*" "awesome" "excellent"

    Ignore anything that has .git/ or dist/ in it's path completely, and don't inspect
    the contents of png or jpg files.

How it works

total-rename will scan every file matched by the pattern you specify, and look for every occurence of the search string in every casing format. This works by taking the search string and converting it to different casings to search for. The generated casings may be inaccurate depending on the input string, and it would seem the most accurate casings are generated when the input is lower space cased. This also applies to the replacement string.

After having collected every occurence of the string within every file's content and path, you have the option to review every change in an interactive way. Nothing is replaced until the interactive yes-no session is done. If you don't want to review every change, you can pass the --force flag.

About

This was my very first Go project, and it was meant as a learning experience for trying out the Go language while building something useful that I needed.

Simply put, I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. When I started writing this I had written exactly 0 lines of Go code.

Things I wanted to cover in this project in order to learn Go was:

• Basic types
• String manipulation
• File I/O
• Goroutines
• Channels
• Splitting work to run in parallel with goroutines and channels, avoiding deadlocks
• Testing
• Using external dependencies
• Manipulating the terminal with colors and moving the cursor (holy shit that was cumbersome)
• Accepting user input (fmt.Scanln() does not do what I think it does...)
• Cross-compilation

Disclaimer: the following paragraphs describe my experience using Go, and it's not all good. I am not saying "Go sucks!", I am just pointing out my personal disappointments as a Node/.NET developer.

I have to say, after having written this project in Go, I have a renewed appreciation for JavaScript and everything you get for free, including (but not limited to) filtering/mapping arrays, arrow functions, Promises, and the wealth of small modules available on npm. Every time I had to declare a result array, then a for ... range loop that result = append(result, ...) just to map from 1 thing to another, a tiny piece of my soul died.

I'm using macOS as my development machine, but I want to target Windows and Linux as well, so it's awesome that Go supports cross compilation! 👍 goreleaser makes this even better by managing everything related to building for different OS'es and architectures.

Tests run super fast, which is nice! 👍 However writing the tests was pretty weird, having to pass in t to assert.X(t, ...) felt awkward. And the output from go test is not very human friendly; thankfully richgo made it a little more readable by coloring the output.

Using go get to grab packages is nice, but pulling the latest master every time does not seem very production-friendly to me. Sure, master is supposed to be stable at all costs, but humans are not perfect and accidental breaking changes slip in. It's awesome that go get is built in, but I think version locking is important.

All my projects on my box reside in ~/Projects, and my work projects in a subfolder. Being forced to put everything in $GOPATH/src/github.com/jeffijoe/my-package was kind of annoying. I know you don't have to do this, but the tooling seems to break if you deviate. Oh well. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I was using VS Code for writing Go, and the Go extension is awesome; auto imports is nice when it works (it won't work if your code does not compile 😞).

I've been used to using 2-space indentation for years - having to use 8 tabs really grinds my gears. I'm all for having a code standard enforced by the official tooling, but 8 tabs is crazy if you ask me — so much screen real-estate goes to waste. Please, at least make it 4... spaces! 🙃

With all this being said, for building performance-critical system components, I would definitely consider using Go! While the syntax is lacking, such as arrow funcs, more type inference, and basic functional programming things like array map, filter and reduce, the performance is great and goroutines + channels + sync.WaitGroup is awesome!

If you're a Go expert and think my code sucks and could have been written in a better way, tell me! I'd love to know what could be better, shorter, faster, more concise and prettier to look at. 😀

Author

Jeff Hansen - @Jeffijoe