Very interesting, I’ll definitely give it a try!

Another approach I recently discovered is an old but beautiful Unix-style tool for renaming files: vidir - edit a directory in your text editor. It’s part of the moreutils suite [1].

You get the list of filenames in your editor – edit them as you like, save, exit, and it renames the files. It uses whatever editor is set in your $EDITOR env var, so it doesn’t have to be vi/vim.

You can also pipe in a list of files, e.g. `find . -type f | vidir -`, to edit just the files you want - and you can even change paths (add, rename, remove directories) in the editor to move files around easily.

To try it quickly on macOS: `brew install moreutils`

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

• ddlsmurf

  yesterday at 7:49 PM

  if you can forgive a shameless plug, I wrote https://github.com/ddlsmurf/fled some time ago and it serves me very well to this day. (It's not half as advanced as OP's tool but still useful)

Incredible name choice here - it's very rare that I get this feeling associating a new project with its name. I'm filled with feelings that touch on nostalgia, utility, UX design history and computing heritage when I hear the name F2 associated with a batch renaming tool. Great job!

• nine_k

  yesterday at 11:25 PM

  It's indeed a name that immediately rings the right bell, without being an ungoogleable common noun or verb. Kudos.

  (Though for those of us who cut their teeth on tools like Norton Commander on the original IBM PC, the association would be with F6.)

• ayoisaiah

  yesterday at 10:32 PM

  Thank you! I knew I had a winner the moment it popped into my head :)

Small typo: the example given for "--replace-limit -1" reads:

    abc_abc.txt | 123_abc.txt

    abc_abc.txt | abc_123.txt

A small idea for an alternative, more flexible option: "--replace-range", where you could use a well established syntax to represent ranges such as the one from Python and Go slices, so it's not only possible to replace from the leftmost or rightmost but also in-between.

[1]: https://f2.freshman.tech/guide/tutorial#limiting-the-number-...

Awesome tool, thanks for sharing. One feature I would love to see on renaming tools is the following:

  -A - Sample of the of the ACTUAL file name
  -B - Sample of the desired filename

  f2 -A 001.pdf -B 001_renamed.pdf

  001.pdf => 001_renamed.pdf
  002.pdf => 002_renamed.pdf
  ...

Most important: Worked locally and did not send the filenames to chatGPT ;)

• ayoisaiah

  yesterday at 10:31 PM

  You can already do this with F2 by using capture variables:

    f2 -f '(\d+).pdf' -r '{$1}_renamed.pdf'
  

  Does that align with what you're looking for?

Dry-run by default! Use of metadata like EXIF! Undo!

Here's some great product and UX chops, not just coding chops.

I really like your CLI design here, clearly extremely well thought out, lots of great taste on display here: https://f2.freshman.tech/guide/tutorial

The EXIF stuff to create folders based on the date photos were taken is fantastic! https://f2.freshman.tech/guide/organizing-image-library

This tool solves a problem that I face all the time, I am definitely going to be using this often.

• ayoisaiah

  yesterday at 10:41 PM

  Thanks a lot Simon! I'm really thrilled to hear it's hitting the mark for you :)

For photos, I'm guessing you can use Exiftool's built in geolocation feature to add the city and country first.

https://exiftool.org/geolocation.html

Wow, this goes instantly to my toolbox. Thanks for writing this and sharing it!

It only happens a few times a year that I need to batch rename. Buy when I do my adrenaline levels go up by about two espressos.

Wow, it can integrate with exiftool. I use exiftool to rename photo files, but I think f2 offers more flexible renaming features.

The undo functionality is a nice touch. I know cuz I write scripts to rename files and made mistakes before.

In windows I use PowerToys - power rename to rename files. But I'm not a power user I rarely need renaming something.

Really nice, wow.

Honestly I don't see myself remembering and using the variables features(which gives the exiftool feature others here are raving about) but it's already insanely good without that. Love the ability to refine your selection with further -f flags. Also the ability to rename while create nested paths is so good.

Suggestion, having an "up"[1] mode where you can see the dry run output in a live updating thing when you are adding further -fs and -rs.

[1] https://github.com/akavel/up