What does HackerNews think of vimv?

There are a lot of tools dedicated to this. My past favorite is vimv [1].

However, for me this operation is so rare that having a separate command just for mass-renaming files does not seem to be justified.

[1]: https://github.com/thameera/vimv

" ... renaming many files ..."

I think folks should be aware of 'vimv' which opens your pwd in an editor and you just edit your filenames in 'vi' ... and all of the renaming happens upon saving and quitting.

Not sure if this is the official/canonical distribution, but for what it's worth:

https://github.com/thameera/vimv

Links for mass moving mentioned in the page:

- 2018: https://github.com/lgommans/vinamer - 2017: https://github.com/thameera/vimv - 2017: https://github.com/abaldwin88/roamer - 2006: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ , `vidir`

Renaming a single file is not very interesting. Renaming a whole bunch of files is much more interesting, and when I need to do that, I use vimv[0].

[0]: https://github.com/thameera/vimv

I do not use a terminal based file manager - I find that a better workflow for me is to use sshfs to create a local mount on my laptop and then just use the Finder to browse ... which gives me preview, etc.

HOWEVER, there is a specific use-case - renaming a bunch of files in a directory - where I do use a "file manager" and that file manager is 'vimv'.[1]

vimv is a very simple tool - you run vimv in a directory and suddenly the vi editor opens up with the contents of that directory. You then use the vi editor to edit the filenames any way you like. Upon :wq, the files in that directory are renamed.

Very useful - and in many cases, much faster than crafting a sed/awk one liner to do the renaming (especially if some of the renaming is arbitrary or random).

[1] https://github.com/thameera/vimv