So fucking exhausting when you have to change many things in a codebase in a repetitive manner with search and replace and it's not worth the time to write a rool to automate it. One of those special cases where you wish search and replace would support some kind of templating or be variable depending on the search result

Can’t you use refactoring?

Do you use regex in search & replace? It can do wonders.

might be a good job for AI for once

don't quote me on that. they'd have to actually design it as a feature and they have not

and you'd still have to go look over every change cuz that thing fucks up so much

also in vscode you can use regex in search and replace btw

most text editors

I write those all the time but I have only used them in single files not whole codebases

There's regex

But also, I wish you could write something like

Replace every occurrence of

Pos::Range($range)

with

SourceRange::new($range, $source).pos()

wherein $source is

- the unique variable in the nearest scope of type Sym or

- the unique Sym reachable via member access and parameterless immutable functions from variables in scope or

leave it blank and mark for human review

A semantic replace system like that would have saved me more than an hour today

@Lensflare was not a traditional refactoring job, just a whole bunch of css to edit.

@cafecortado yup, worked a lot with regex, just used the caveman version of that tool, when in fact a way more advanced version existed I didn't know about.

@jestdotty unfortunately only allowed in a very restricted kind of usage, no in-editor AI for now, whole codebase not allowed as context.

Cave people, I can select the whole document, do ctrl+I and describe in English an advanced replace and smash enter. No regex needed. It's called AI (Codeium)