What I Need
I want to find a free/open source solution to replace the Editing names
function of TotalCommander's Multi-rename Tool
(under the file menu).
What is this Editing names
?
Let me explain how the Editing names
works if you never used TotalCommander (TC) before:
TC lets you selected multiple files and directories from different path. I'll select one folder and one file for example.
- C:\Windows\fosl\
- D:\App\App.exe
When those object are selected, you can choose
Multi-rename Tool
(or press Ctrl-M) to open the mass renaming dialogue. There's theEditing Names
button. When you press it, a temporary text file is opened (by any editor you selected). The content looks like this for our example:fosl App.exe
So there are only file/folder names, you can edit it using whatever editor you like, then save the file.
After you done editing, head back to TC, press
OK
then TC will load edited file names as renaming target. Then you can just hit theStart
button to finish the renaming.
What's the difference between the Multi-rename Tool and normal Export/Import function of regular renaming tools?
Exported files need to be saved, then import, it's a waste of time and it's annoying. Beside you need to delete the file after renaming, everytime.
Exported files looks like this (for our example above):
C:\Windows\fosl\ D:\App\App.exe
or this: (csv format)
C:\Windows\fosl\, C:\Windows\fosl\ D:\App\App.exe, D:\App\App.exe
So it is YOU need to handle the full path, take care that you don't mess up the path or it won't work, it's too tedious. It also limited your editing, you can't do something like replace all "App" to "NotApp"
for example, because you'll ruin the path D:\App
While Editing Names
only exposes file names so that you can handle the renaming gracefully, TC will handle the rest.
Notes:
- TC is not free.
- I prefer GUI editing with drag-n-drop supporting, just like TC (instead of Cygwin + find or Python + repren).