scooter – interactive find-and-replace terminal UI app

scooter is an interactive terminal application for finding and replacing text across multiple files. It allows users to inspect proposed changes and decide exactly which matches should be modified.

The application is particularly useful when making changes across a codebase or collection of configuration files. Rather than immediately replacing every occurrence of a search term, scooter presents matching results for review, helping users avoid unintended modifications.

Searches can use ordinary text or regular expressions, with support for capture groups that allow matched content to be reused in replacement strings.

scooter also checks whether files have changed since the search was performed. If a proposed replacement no longer matches the original content, the application skips that change and reports the problem, reducing the risk of modifying stale results.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Interactive find-and-replace interface for searching multiple files and selectively applying changes.
• Supports fixed-string searches and regular expressions.
• Uses regular expression capture groups in replacement strings.
• Optional advanced regular expression engine supporting features such as negative lookahead.
• Multiline search mode for matching text across line boundaries.
• Configurable case-sensitive matching and whole-word searches.
• Include or exclude files using glob patterns.
• Respects .gitignore and .ignore files when traversing directories.
• Optional inclusion of hidden files and directories.
• Displays search results with syntax highlighting and configurable colour themes.
• Allows individual matches or groups of matches to be included or excluded before replacement.
• Opens selected matches in an external text editor at the appropriate line number.
• Detects files modified since searching and skips replacements that would use stale content.
• Supports text piped through standard input as an alternative to searching files.
• Provides a non-interactive mode for scripted find-and-replace operations.
• Supports non-UTF-8 text files, including Latin-1 encoded content.
• Customisable keyboard shortcuts, preview wrapping and replacement escape-sequence handling.
• Cross-platform support – runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Website: github.com/thomasschafer/scooter
Support:
Developer: Thomas Schafer
License: MIT License

scooter is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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