IEdit: Interactive, multi-occurrence editing in your buffer

Have you ever heard of iedit for Emacs by Victor Ren (Update:Seems the github link I posted earlier was way out of date)? Me neither, until recently, and that’s a terrible shame as it is a cornerstone of my programming workflow now that I’ve learned about it. So what does it do, then? Well, quite simply, you can edit multiple, identical string occurrences at the same time. The twist here is it uses in-buffer editing without disrupting your workflow with prompts, windows or any of that stuff: you plonk your point down on a word you want to change; you run iedit-mode ; and now all the occurrences of that word is highlighted on your screen, like isearch , and when you alter a highlighted word, the other highlighted words change also. How cool is that? Modern IDEs have it already – usually hidden away in the “Refactoring” section – and does exactly the same thing, but iedit is a lot dumber as it cannot infer context beyond I want to iedit all occurrences ofword* point is on.*

If you regularly replace variables or words with M-% or C-M-% — well, you can retire that workflow now, as iedit will handle it for you. Sure, go ahead; use the older way if you have complex, partial replacements you want to do, but if you’re renaming a variable in a buffer… Why not use iedit?

Here’s a sample demonstration showing what exactly it is I’m talking about, in brilliant technicolor:

Improving iedit

So iedit’s pretty great and all that, but I don’t replace words across a whole buffer very often; sure, I hear you say: “just narrow-to-defun with C-x n d !” Indeed, narrowing’s great, but this blog is all about half-baked, half-inventions and cobbled-together scripts, and this post is no exception!

I prefer a workflow that minimizes the use of commands to do routine tasks – a fairly common goal for most Emacs hackers. The code below aim to do just that: when invoked, it will take the word at point and only iedit occurrences in the local defun (Note: don’t forget that although defun is Lisp-speak, most modes automatically support commands like mark-defun or narrow-to-defun .) If you pass an argument to the function, it will iedit all occurrences in the entire buffer.

The iedit author suggest that you bind iedit-mode – the default command for entering iedit – to C-; and I agree: it’s rarely used and easy to type.

Update:Le Wang pointed out that I was using an older version of iedit; the code has been updated to reflect the API changes.