You might be familiar with the great
vidir utility which allows
editing of contents of a directory in a text editor. This is a great
concept, because editors are great at text manipulation - which in
turn yields more efficiency for mass renaming/moving/deletion than
typing commands in a shell or using a GUI. vidir is a great tool,
there's no argument to be had - it's even completely decoupled from
the actual $EDITOR
used. If you're using Debian, it's contained in
the moretools
package (which has other helpful utilities).
However, if you're using Emacs as your editor, there's no need for
vidir. In fact, there's some extra work involved to open a shell,
change to the directory in which you're already working and then use
vidir. Besides, Emacs comes with a built-in mode that already has
the same functionality. The well known
dired-mode,
has a lesser known option to actually edit the dired
buffer. This mode
can be toggled with M-x dired-toggle-read-only
(or C-x C-q
). Then
you make your edits to the files (rename, move, delete) and commit
them using the familiar C-c C-c
.
Here's the official documentation
on editing dired
buffers and here's a short video demonstration of
me using writable dired
buffers.