If you have never used wgrep with rg.el to rename a function in several files, try it | that will blow your mind

Apr 19, 2022

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Hey Emacsers,

Have you ever needed to rename a function that appears in several files?

Let's see how we can do this with Emacs.

In the post the fantastic rg.el, we've seen that rg.el is a nice Emacs interface to the cli ripgrep which lets us do searches for regexp in files interactively with rg command, get the results in a dedicated buffer *rg* (by default), browse those matches, modify the searches parameters and modify the matched regexps, all from within the dedicated buffer *rg*.

In this post we see how to rename interactively a function that appears in several files using rg.el and wgrep!

Let's go ;)

Initial state¶

Let assume that we are working on the org-mode code base

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs/org-mode.git

and we want to rename the function org-link-expand-abbrev (that replaces link abbreviations in a given org link, read its dedicated section in the post search options and link abbreviations for more details) into org-link-RENAMED like this:

org-link-expand-abbrev  ->  org-link-RENAMED

We use git (in a terminal) to "monitor" our changes in the code base and to revert back to the initial state at the end of this "demonstration".

First, running git status tells us that we are on the branch main, we have nothing to commit and our working tree is clean:

git status

prints:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

We can obtain the current commit (on which I'm running the example, your ouptuts might differ a little bit if you're checked out at another commit) by running this following command:

git rev-parse --short HEAD

that prints:

685d78f63

Now that we are clear about the initial state, we can continue.

Call wgrep-change-to-wgrep-mode, make changes and abort changes with wgrep-abort-changes¶

Let's search for the regexp org-link-expand-abbrev (that exactly matches the string org-link-expand-abbrev) in org-mode directory using rg.el:

M-x rg,
write org-link-expand-abbrev,
select the directory where org-mode source code is,
choose all as type file.

We get the following buffer named *rg* (in the mode rg-mode) that shows that we've matched org-link-expand-abbrev twice, once in the file lisp/ol.el and once in the file lisp/org-element.el:

-*- mode: rg; default-directory: "/tmp/org-mode/" -*-
rg started at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

/usr/bin/rg [...]

File: [ol.el] lisp/ol.el
1011  (defun org-link-expand-abbrev (link)

File: [org-element.el] lisp/org-element.el
3497  (setq raw-link (org-link-expand-abbrev

rg finished (2 matches found) at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

Now in the buffer *rg*, we press e (bound to wgrep-change-to-wgrep-mode) and two things happens:

the matched lines are now editable in the buffer *rg* and,
the keymap wgrep-mode-map becomes the local map.

Then, in *rg* buffer, we transform org-link-expand-abbrev into org-link-RENAMED the way we prefer (we have all the Emacs power, some of us might use query-replace, other might use multiple-cursors.el, other iedit, etc.). And so *rg* buffer looks like this:

-*- mode: rg; default-directory: "/tmp/org-mode/" -*-
rg started at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

/usr/bin/rg [...]

File: [ol.el] lisp/ol.el
1011  (defun org-link-RENAMED (link)

File: [org-element.el] lisp/org-element.el
3497  (setq raw-link (org-link-RENAMED

rg finished (2 matches found) at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

Now that we've finished editing the buffer *rg*, we change our mind and finally decide that we no longer want to apply those changes to the corresponding files.

No problem, we just have to hit C-c C-k (bound to wgrep-abort-changes) to abort the changes. We're back to the "normal" *rg* buffer where nothing is editable and none of our changes have been taken into account:

-*- mode: rg; default-directory: "/tmp/org-mode/" -*-
rg started at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

/usr/bin/rg [...]

File: [ol.el] lisp/ol.el
1011  (defun org-link-expand-abbrev (link)

File: [org-element.el] lisp/org-element.el
3497  (setq raw-link (org-link-expand-abbrev

rg finished (2 matches found) at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

At that point maybe you should (must) stop me and ask:

Are we really 'back to normal'?
How can I be sure that my files haven't been compromised?
Could you prove it?

As we started with a clean working tree in a git repository with nothing to commit, we just have to run the command:

git status

that prints:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

This way, we can be sure that none of our files have been modified.

Note that when we are editing the buffer *rg*, until we explicitly run a command (like wgrep-abort-changes) of wgrep package, nothing is reflected in the file system (neither in the buffers that are visiting files that could be modified by wgrep, for instance in our case lisp/ol.el and lisp/org-element.el).

Changes applied to the file system: wgrep-finish-edit and wgrep-save-all-buffers¶

Now, let's modify again the *rg* buffer, the same way as before (starting by pressing e (bound to wgrep-change-to-wgrep-mode) to make the buffer editable):

-*- mode: rg; default-directory: "/tmp/org-mode/" -*-
rg started at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

/usr/bin/rg [...]

File: [ol.el] lisp/ol.el
1011  (defun org-link-RENAMED (link)

File: [org-element.el] lisp/org-element.el
3497  (setq raw-link (org-link-RENAMED

rg finished (2 matches found) at Mon Apr 18 13:03:59

This time we want to save those changes in the buffer *rg* and want to see them reflected in the corresponding files.

To do so, we press C-x C-s (bound to wgrep-finish-edit) and we see in the echo area:

Successfully finished. (2 changed)

We might think that those changes have been reflected in the file sytem but this is not the case by default and we can check it as we did before by running the command git status.

In the buffer *rg* that is no longer editable and that took into account those changes, we can do two things:

navigate between the matched lines that we've changed pressing n or p. We see the changes reflected in the buffers ol.el (visiting the file lisp/ol.el) and org-element.el (visiting the file lisp/org-element.el). We also observe that those modifications are not saved in the buffers. And if we change our mind again and we no longer want those changes to be applied, in each buffer we can "manually" undo those changes.
if we want those changes to be reflected in the file system, we can call the command wgrep-save-all-buffers.

We decide to save all the buffers, and so we run:

M-x wgrep-save-all-buffers

This time our our changes have been reflected in the file system and we can check it by running the following command:

git status

that prints:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

  modified:   lisp/ol.el
  modified:   lisp/org-element.el

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

So the files lisp/ol.el and lisp/org-element.el have been modified.

To be sure that those modifications correspond to our renaming, we can run the following command that prints the git difference between the last commit and the unstaged modified files:

git diff

diff --git a/lisp/ol.el b/lisp/ol.el
index 1b2bb9a9a..642dcb5da 100644
--- a/lisp/ol.el
+++ b/lisp/ol.el
@@ -1008,7 +1008,7 @@ and then used in capture templates."
     if store-func
     collect store-func))

-(defun org-link-expand-abbrev (link)
+(defun org-link-RENAMED (link)
   "Replace link abbreviations in LINK string.
 Abbreviations are defined in `org-link-abbrev-alist'."
   (if (not (string-match "^\\([^:]*\\)\\(::?\\(.*\\)\\)?$" link)) link
diff --git a/lisp/org-element.el b/lisp/org-element.el
index 28339c1b8..cbfcfe074 100644
--- a/lisp/org-element.el
+++ b/lisp/org-element.el
@@ -3494,7 +3494,7 @@ Assume point is at the beginning of the link."
  ;; (e.g., insert [[shell:ls%20*.org]] instead of
  ;; [[shell:ls *.org]], which defeats Org's focus on
  ;; simplicity.
-   (setq raw-link (org-link-expand-abbrev
+   (setq raw-link (org-link-RENAMED
      (org-link-unescape
       (replace-regexp-in-string
        "[ \t]*\n[ \t]*" " "

If we were in a refactoring phase in our development where we've decided to rename org-link-expand-abbrev by org-link-RENAMED, the next step would be to commit those changes.

As this is not our case (and also to demonstrate how to revert back ALL the changes not commited that we've made in a git repository) we prefer to revert back to the last commit by running the following command:

git checkout .

And we can verify that we're back to our original state by running the following commands git status and git rev-parse --short HEAD as we did at the beginning of this post.

Make the changes automatic with wgrep-auto-save-buffer¶

As written in the documentation of wgrep, if we want to save the buffers automatically when we call wgrep-finish-edit (and so apply the changes in the file system), we can set the variable wgrep-auto-save-buffer to t like this:

(setq wgrep-auto-save-buffer t)

We could have used sed to do it non interactively¶

Renaming a function like we did before with rg.el and wgrep could also be done using the cli sed (that can search some regexp in files (not only) and replace matches in-place with another string) combined with eiter find or grep to list the files we want to modify which are "passed" to sed using the utility xargs.

Specifically, in org-mode directory, we can replace the occurences of org-link-expand-abbrev by org-link-RENAMED, by running the following command line (in a terminal):

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/org-link-expand-abbrev/org-link-RENAMED/g'

-print0 tells find to separate file names with the null character,
-0 tells xargs that arguments are separated by the null character,
-i command line flag tells sed to do the substitions (command sd of sed) of org-link-expand-abbrev by org-link-RENAMED in-place and,
the flag g (in 's/.../.../g') tells sed to apply the replacement to all matches not just the first.

Instead of using find, we could have use grep to list not all the files in org-mode directory but only those that contains org-link-expand-abbrev. And doing so, we would have made the same replacements. Here is the full command line to run in a terminal that produces the same result:

grep -rlZ 'org-link-expand-abbrev' | xargs -0 sed -i 's/org-link-expand-abbrev/org-link-RENAMED/g'

r flag tells grep to search recursively in the current directory,
l flag tells grep to print only file names (not the matches),
Z flag tells grep to print the null characher after each file names,
after the pipe |, it's the same as before.

WE ARE DONE!!!