Emacs bug report logs - #267
dired-do-query-replace-regex replace ALL

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Message #5 received at submit <at> emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com (full text, mbox):

From: xah lee <xah <at> xahlee.org>
To: emacs-pretest-bug <at> gnu.org
Subject: dired-do-query-replace-regex replace ALL
Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 03:26:26 -0700

Emacs suggestion:

when in dired mode in the processing of doing dired-do-query-replace- 
regexp (shortcut Q), it offers the ability to do replacement without  
asking on the current file, by pressing the ! key, but it would be  
nice to have:

(1) the ability to do ALL replacements on ALL files without further  
asking.
(2) the ability to not do any replacement on the current file.

I use dired-do-query-replace-regexp few times a week, typically on  
tens of files, but maybe once in a month i do it over hundreds or  
thuosands of files on a website.

Often, after some replacement, it becomes obvious that it is safe to  
do ALL replacement for ALL files. When this is needed, typically i  
can just hold down the ! key. But when the number of files is  
hundreds or more, typically there will be seveal 5 second delays  
where i assume emacs is doing garbage collection. The bottom line is  
that, holding down ! is not a good solution because i end up having  
to wait a total of maybe 20 or 30 seconds during the whole operation.

For this reason, i often abort the operation, then switch to a perl  
or python script i've written that does blind find/replace on all  
files. This will finish the job on thousands of files within 5  
seconds. But I couldn't reply on this since often i need  
interactively see and confirm the replacements, which emacs provides.  
(emacs also lets me view the change file afterwards or decide to save  
them...etc, which i won't be able to do with perl...)

So, it would be nice, if emacs's dired-do-query-replace-regexp offer  
the option to do all replacement on all files.

Perhaps this can be introduced as pressing the  <at>  key.

For suggestion item (2), the scenario is that sometimes i have a big  
file and it is apparent that i don't want any replacement to happen  
on that file. As things are, i have to repeatedly pressing n while  
paying attention not to go over to the next file. This is a tiring  
process.

dired-do-query-replace-regexp is very nice and i've been using it for  
2 years. For just tens of files the above isn't a problem. But when  
doing few hundred files, and on tens of replacement pairs (i.e. using  
dired-do-query-replace-regexp tens of times, each time on hundreds of  
files), the above features seems a very good one to have. It seems  
also a logical feature complementating the various recursive edit and  
edit-replacement-text currently provided by emacs.

PS some background... I'm doing on static websites, which has few  
hundred or thousand files, such as systimatically changing a style  
markup, etc. In the past 2 days, i spent entire 2 days using dired-do- 
query-replace-regexp (in combination with perl and python script).

Thanks.

  Xah
  xah <at> xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

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