Emacs: Xah Find Replace (xah-find.el) ๐Ÿ“ฆ

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

โ€œxah-find.elโ€ is a emacs package for find/replace text.

This package provides emacs commands for find replace in a directory, similar to unix grep and sed, but written entirely in emacs lisp.

emacs xah-find 2022-01-09
find and replace with xah-find.el

This package provides these commands:

Get it by Donation

Goto paypal.com, send $32 to Xah@XahLee.org (be sure to include your correct email address. I need that to send it to you.)

Write in message area: xah-find.el

Features

โ€ข No dependencies on unix/linux grep/sed/find. Especially useful on Microsoft Windows.

โ€ข Output is highlighted and clickable for jumping to occurrence.

โ€ข Pure emacs regex, not shell regex or python/perl regex. Exact same behavior in Linux or Mac or Windows.

โ€ข Reliably Find Replace string that contains lots Unicode chars. No worry about file encoding used. Emacs takes care of it. The find replace string are sequence of chars, not bytes (or locale) as in grep/sed. See Linux Shell Util uniq Unicode Bug and Problems of grep in Emacs

โ€ข Reliably Find Replace string that contains lots escape slashes or backslashes. For example, find replace source code that contains regex, or Microsoft Windows's file path.

โ€ข Reliably Find Replace string that contains newline chars. These commands treat text to be searched as one big string (by emacs buffer), not as lines as in grep/sed or most programing language regexes. So it's much easier to search a block of text that contain newlines, search language source code. No need to deal with multi-line flags.

How to Use

Just call one of the commands. For example (Alt+x xah-find-replace-text), it'll promp you for search string, replace string, directory, file path regex for filter, case sensitivity, whether to backup, etc.

Video Demo

Find Replace Scripts

Emacs Find Replace