Nabeel Valley

Multi File Editing - An Update

A while ago I wrote about some ideas I had around scripting text manipulation where I mentioned a few ideas, namely:

  1. A text-based implementation of Zed's MultiBuffers
  2. A programming language for text manipulation that looks something like Macros

The final solution I had in mind was to make something composable that could make it really nice to apply huge chunks of changes to many files in a structured way

While at some point I'd like to get to the text manipulation language I see in my head, today I'd like to present some small, solutions I've been working on that enable some of the composition I had in mind

touchup

First off, this is a really simple tool. It's similar to the in-stream editor I hacked together previously but you know - less hacky. It's also fully standalone and doesn't depend on Nushell - and more usefully - it exposes a programmable API in Go

I've called it touchup and it can be installed using go install github.com/sftsrv/touchup and is used like so:

first-command | touchup | second-command

You can also use the --ext flag with touchup to provide a file extension so your editor automatically does some syntax highlighting for you

It's a pipe that lets you interact with the output from one command before passing it to the next. This is useful for quickly inspecting some data or doing a manual edit before handing over control

It can also be imported and used in a Go program like so:

import (
	touchup "github.com/sftsrv/touchup/pkg"
)

// get the user's preferred text editor from $EDITOR
editor, err := touchup.GetDefaultEditor()

// pass some content to the editor, and use the result
result, err := touchup.EditFile(editor, "prefix", "ext", content)

mex

The next bit of the composition is mex. This is a program that extracts content from search tools like grep and ripgrep, lets you edit all those search results in a single file, and commits your edits to disk

It can be installed with go install github.com/sftsrv/mex and is used like so:

First, perform a search using something like grep -r -n -H my-search (-n for line numbers, -H for file names)

Then you can pipe those results to mex in a few ways depending on what you're trying to do:

  1. Using mex edit you can directly edit and then apply all the changes automatically:
grep -r -n -H my-search | mex edit
  1. Using mex gen to generate a changeset:
grep -r -n -H my-search >> changes.md

Edit changes.md however you want, then use mex apply to write them to disk:

cat changes.md | mex apply
  1. A spicy version of the above workflow, is to use touchup explicitly to edit the files:

Not that you'd ever need to actually do this since mex edit does this already, but just for fun, here you go

grep -r -n -H my-search | mex gen | touchup --ext md | mex apply

Future

Yup. I'm still working towards my pie in the sky. And of course, I'll drop and update once it's done