I really like advance find and replace in kate editor. You can optionally use regex and operate on multiple files.
Very importantly it has a robust preview changes ability. it is comfortable to use even with lots of hits, lots of files. So you do not need to apply a bunch of changes and hope you considered every permutation as with a cli tool like sed.
One thing that would really improve my life would be a tool like this which allows you to save search queries and options.
Don't work for me:
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Kate has a popup for history in the fields which is somewhat helpful but limited. When trying out different queries you don't have a way to remember which one actually worked so going by the history just ends in repeating the same errors over and over. Also it doesn't match the "find" and "replace" fields nor does it associate them with the other options like directory, etc.
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Keeping notes in a text file is of course possible but cumbersome. I would like the computer to do work like that for me.
For single file searches regex101.com (non floss) and regexr.com (GPLv3) are great in-browser tools for learning and you can save the search. But to operate locally on many files, it doesn't work.
Does anyone know any tools that do anything like this? Can find various utilities which operate on file names but I am looking for file content. Certainly this exists ya?
(Post image is screenshot from Kate website of Kate on windows.)
Why not run sed and pipe to diff to preview changes?
You'd still have to manually copy out the command line to a notes file, but I don't think that that's too terrible. You could use a terminal-integrated snippets palette to make it a little smoother.
I'm not aware of any program that does exactly everything you want it to, so you might write your own or extend an existing one, as mentioned.