Álvaro Ramírez has a new video up. This one, Bending Emacs 4, demonstrates several ways of batch renaming files. The secret sauce in most of these methods is the ability of the Dired buffer to become writable and have the changes reflected in the underlying file system. Every time I use it, it seems like magic.
Ramírez’s video shows several ways of performing bulk renamings in the Dired environment. Probably the easiest—or the most natural to me—is simply using a keyboard macro. For instance, if you have a directory full of files ending in .org and want them all to end in .txt, you simply start recording a macro, change the first file, move to the next line, and close the macro. Then you can run the macro on the rest of the buffer to rename all the files. After the renaming, all you need do is type C-c C-c to instantiate the changes into the file system.
Ramírez’s favored way of making the changes is to use Magnor Sveen’s wonderful Multiple Cursors package. It’s a bit more flexible than a keyboard macro because you have finer control over which lines will be changed. Once you’ve got the desired files marked, you simple make the change on one and they are all affected.
The video is only 6 minutes, 42 seconds long so it should be easy to fit in. Ramírez even includes a DWIM command line method of renaming the files. The nice thing about using Dired is that you can arrange for Git to be aware of the renaming. Take a look at the video for the details.