edir

Be very careful with vidir as deleting happens unprompted. I find edir to be a better alternative. https://github.com/bulletmark/edir

Try vidir from moreutils (or its improved version, https://github.com/bulletmark/edir ). It opens the list of filenames in a given directory (or set of files passed on cmdline) in an editor of your choice, and then you use your editor to rename them; the changes get applied when your editor is closed.

> For file management these days, Dired is my interface of choice. It is simply the more elegant tool for the job. Case in point: renaming a bunch of files in a directory to arbitrary names. With a shell, my standard approach would have been to run some variant of `ls -1 > foo.sh`, edit `foo.sh` to insert `mv` on each line to a renamed target file, `chmod u+x foo.sh` to be executable, run `foo.sh`, delete `foo.sh` and call it a day. I used to do this before I discovered vidir. [1] vidir is not actually tied to vi; it lets you rename and delete files through your `$EDITOR`. You edit a temporary file that looks like this: ... 0093<tab>./fstab 0094<tab>./fuse.conf 0095<tab>./fwupd ... There is also https://github.com/bulletmark/edir designed to improve on vidir. I haven't used it yet. I'll give Emacs another try some day, I swear,

This looks neat, but has a lot going on. I really like how minimalist yet extensible lf [0] is and just use edir [1] to rename files in bulk. Gluing them both together is really easy too. - [0] https://github.com/gokcehan/lf - [1] https://github.com/bulletmark/edir