Emacs-wgrep VS multiple-cursors.el

But you probably wish something like wgrep (writable-grep), which is similar to wdired if you are familiar with that one. It will basically let you grep your files and display results in a buffer, then edit that buffer, and finally save changes to all referenced files.

Oh yeah, it gets even more interesting in large refactors, say an involved rename that requires you check the context before you do so (like not just global search and replace). I do a search, this opens a buffer with all results, with file name, position, all that, and Emacs can allow you to "peek" into the file without even leaving the search buffer focus (i.e use a split screen). Then, use https://github.com/mhayashi1120/Emacs-wgrep to do the magic of in-place editing.

If you use the grepping commands from the Consult package, consult-grep, consult-git-grep or consult-ripgrep, then you’ll probably want to install and load the embark-consult package, which adds support for exporting a list of grep results to an honest grep-mode buffer, on which you can even use wgrep if you wish.

The `Emacs-wgrep` [1] package is what allows you to edit a standard Emacs grep buffer and have the specified changes applied to all the project's files. I just recently started using it, and it's extremely handy!

[1]: https://github.com/mhayashi1120/Emacs-wgrep

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

Have you take a look at wgrep? https://github.com/mhayashi1120/Emacs-wgrep

You'll need to install an extension for it, but yes it does. Here is one example: https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el

For me, the beauty of Beancount[0] is that it's just text files in Git. There's a web UI I use for generating reports, and a Python API with which I hacked together some import/export scripts, but 99% of my interactions with it are via Emacs[1] and Magit.

A ton of repetitive bookkeeping tasks become so much easier when you can copy and paste, or use keyboard macros or something like multiple-cursors[2], rather than have to click tens or hundreds of times in a GUI. Many years ago I used QuickBooks, and basic tasks like importing a bank statement took at least an order of magnitude longer than they do now.

Having my company's books in Git is also huge when it comes to auditing, concurrency, backups, and figuring out where things went wrong when accounts don't balance. As mentioned in another comment: `git diff` is a really powerful tool and it's awesome to be able to check out the books as they existed at a particular point in time. `git blame` is great for when things don't balance. Writing meaningful commit messages and comments keeps me sane when I try to remember a year later why something is recorded the way it is.

The biggest downside—or advantage, depending on how you look at it—is that there's no default or built-in chart of accounts, so you need a certain level of accounting acumen (or professional advice) to set things up at first. I'm pretty sure GnuCash aims to be more plug-and-play, whereas Beancount is more akin to a programming library that you use to build an accounting system that works for you. I agree with the grandparent commenter, who said that text-based accounting is "the best and most flexible accounting experience I've ever had." But the cost of that flexibility is that a certain level of base knowledge is a prerequisite.

[0]: https://beancount.io/

[1]: https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode

[2]: https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el

The original multiple cursors package is amazing for what it is, but it scales very badly. Emacs is efficient when editing at one place at a time (as you'd do normally), and when mc replicates all the edits character-by-character for all the cursors, it does the very opposite of this: many edits all in very different places. It works quite well when using just a few cursors, but going above a dozen of them causes them to be visibly sluggish.

Recently multiple-cursors has been unusable for me on Emacs 29.0.60 (not a release yet). Movements (and possibly other operations) don't work with the following error:

If you intend to use Emacs for this (as opposed to some external script), you're probably better off using the keyboard macros or a regular search&replace instead of multiple cursors (I assume the Magnars flavor of them). As flexible as they are, they don't scale well and they get exponentially slower the more cursors you have. Having 2500 cursors sounds insane.

You can do something similar with multiple cursors.

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:

There is also multiple-cursors.el, which looks the closest to what you want, but it's also the buggiest.