About

git-search-replace is a small utility on top of plain git for performing project-wide search-and-replace only on git-controlled files. It applies its searches to filenames as well as their content. The underlying syntax for the search regex is Python's.

It is designed to be a bit more instructive to the developer, compared to hackish bash scripts around sed.

Key features are:

• By default, only act as grep to show what is going to change.
• Dry run mode '--diff' shows a unidiff of the changes that the search-and-replace would do, so that the developer can review for correctness. No working directory files are modified.
• Fix mode '--fix' performs the actual changes and associated 'git mv'.

Wait, but my awesome editor can already do that!

That's right, but when you are working within a group of people and everyone has their own editor, it becomes quite useful to be able to communicate renames in a way that everyone can easily reproduce, and during conflict resolution it is even more useful (see: resolve-trivial-conflicts). This comes handy especially in commit message, for instance:

    commit 3ed68e243e76783fa2b92fa33f7e4681f0246332
    Author: Dan Aloni <alonid@gmail.com>
    Date:   Sun Jul 26 18:42:52 2015 +0300

    module: renamed with: gsr foo///bar -f

Syntax

Usage: gsr [options] (FROM-SEPARATOR-TO...)

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s STRING, --separator=STRING
                    The separator string which separates FROM regex and TO expression
  -f, --fix             Perform changes in-place
  -d, --diff            Use 'diff' util to show differences
  -e EXCLUDE, --exclude=EXCLUDE
                        Exclude files matching the provided globbing pattern
                        (can be specified more than once)

The expressions are tuples in the form of FROM-SEPARATOR-TO, with SEPARATOR defaults to '///'.

Examples

Shell escaping needs to be taken into consideration. The examples below should work with the major UNIX shells.

gsr old_name///new_name --diff

This shows a diff that represents the replacement of 'old_name' with 'new_name'.

gsr \\bold_name\\b///new_name --fix

This uses Python regex expression \b for matching at word boundaries for whole identifiers. This invocation will perform changes in-place because of '--fix'.

gsr 'things with space///with other stuff' --diff

Note that shells properly de-escape the commas from the expression above.