wl-clipboard.xplr VS moreutils

This operation tends to confuse some people coming from vim or some other terminal file manager, as there's no explicit "copy" or "yank". Once you select files and directories by pressing the space bar or v, you can go to the target path and paste or move the selected files by typing : s c or : s m. However, if it's too unintuitive for you, you can of-course configure it to behave as you want to. Also, there are plugins like xclip.xplr, wl-clipboard.xplr that utilizes the system clipboard to provide a more intuitive copy-paste experience. Additionally, if you hate that you have to do a lot of navigation for copy-pasting, checkout dual-pane.xplr or context-switch.xplr. With these plugins, you can easily switch between the source and target directories while copying or moving files.

I use mutlios and even I'm not that attached to it. The majority of my use is combined with process substitution, and could be replaced with common-ish tools like pee¹ or pipexec for more complex cases. The only occasion when I'm thankful for it is if I want to use a shell function as a target, but there are workarounds for that too.

As a noclobber user the footgun is largely hidden to me, but I feel its presence. multios without globbing support would be less useful, but would still work for most of my use cases. Scanning my shell history I see various cases of relying on zsh's ability to apply sorting and filtering to globs with multios' input redirection, but only a couple where I want that in output redirection.

Even with multios unset the behaviour is different between zsh and bash. For example, multios disables all the expansion, so zsh behaves like more like dash with ': >t{1,2}' by creating a file instead producing an error like bash does.

[FWIW, I google'd multiios to link the option in original comment. It really feels to me like it needs double-i, and I read the single i name the same way you do.]

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I'd be one of those people whose desire for dgsh-like functionality wanes. If it was slight DSL that I could "upgrade" pipelines to I'd probably use it, but not enough to warrant working on it or switching other tooling to support it.

The end of result of this morning's pipeline was breaking my jobs up, and applying some judicious use of nq² to keep track of it. I'd follow your advice and move on to more specialist tools if the job grew significantly or if it became a regular occurrence.

¹ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

² https://git.vuxu.org/nq/about/

For filesystem operations like batch renames at least, I am usually happy with `vidir` (part of `moreutils`: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/).

`vidir [path]` will open an editor with the given directory as buffer contents.

See also: "vipe" from the excellent "moreutils" package: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

There are some other gems in this package. The ones I find myself using regularly are 'ts' and 'sponge' but I'm sure the useful subset depends a lot on the kind of work you are doing

Joey Hess' excellent moreutils¹ comes with vipe which is a generalised solution for these types of tasks. It allows you to run whatever $EDITOR you've configured mid-pipe, making it possible to work your changes up in an interactive editor session. Useful for those of us not smart enough to write up our changes as a series of -c arguments ;)

(It fixes the vim issue by virtue of using a temporary file to do the magic)

¹ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Sounds like `vidir` from moreutils.

vidir and a few others from moreutils

Use pee (yes, I know) from moreutils. Something like:

I would use vidir from moreutils. Then you can do any edits and play around with any regexes you want!

For bulk file renaming, I recommend vidir from moreutils - it lets you rename everything in a directory with your $EDITOR (vim being the default).