I recently had to make tiny changes to a large number of files spread nested through a directory structure. This turns out to be a lot easier than I expected with Emacs.

My use case was actually this blog. It’s been on the go for a while in several different formats, and over the years I’ve used tags to drive different presentations – for example articles tagged ‘news’ ended up on the front page. I no longer do this, which meant a lot of redundant tags to be got rid of, mainly in Nikola’s .meta metadata files but also embedded into .md markdown and .rst restructured text..

My plan was to use Emacs’ rgrep command to recursively traverse the directory structure of posts to find the tags I wanted to remove. This would give me a grep-mode buffer that hyperlinks to the files (and lines) needing changing, which I could then click through to get to where each change needed to be made. Straightforward, but time-consuming and error-prone when there were about 150 files to be changed. Clearly a problem in need of a better solution.

I then discovered the wgrep (“writable grep“) package. This makes the grep-mode buffer editable, with changes being written-back to the underlying files. Exactly what I needed.

Once I’d installed wgrep, the workflow is ridiculously easy:

1. Using rgrep gets a grep-mode buffer
2. C-c C-p makes the buffer editable
3. Changing the lines. In my case I could use string-replace to remove the tags I wanted rid of. More complicated cases might need regexp-replace or even manual editing
4. C-x C-s writes the changes back out

(There are several other keybindings that wgrep makes available, notably C-c C-k to discard all changes.)

That’s it! A job that I expected to take an hour took about 3 minutes.