My friend Watts tweets that he thinks BBEdit has the simplest workflow for doing a search and replace on the files of a directory that do not include some term:
I’m sure BBEdit isn’t the only editor that can do “find all text files in this folder that do not contain ‘foo’ and do a separate multifile search-and-replace within the first search’s result set” in just two operations, but I’d be surprised if any others can do it as easily.
— Watts Martin (@chipotlecoyote) June 19, 2018
I took that as a challenge, of course, and immediately started figuring out how to do it in Emacs. I have a solution that uses two (or arguably 3) simple commands to do the same thing starting from a dired buffer. So the challenge is, how would you do this in Emacs using the minimum number of {commands | keystrokes}1? If you know BBEdit (I don’t) is your solution easier/simpler than the same thing in BBEdit?
Footnotes:
Not counting keystrokes for the search term or regular expressions in the search and replace.