Mike Zamansky has his latest video up. This time it’s about Dired. Dired is one of the great features of Emacs but many users are only dimly aware of it and don’t make full use of its capabilities. Zamansky’s video is an excellent introduction to some of those capabilities. One of those features, writable dired, is extraordinarily useful and something I use all the time. Zamansky has a nice demonstration of using it to rename several files at once.
One feature that Zamansky didn’t mention is doing a regular expression search on a set of files by marking them in Dired and then typing A. You can also do a query replace by typing Q. There are many more commands like these—take a look at the GNU Dired reference card for details.
As with all of Zamansky’s videos, this one is definitely worth your time, especially if you aren’t using Dired regularly. The video is about 16 and a third minutes long so you’ll need to put aside some time for it.