re:patch is a line-oriented find-and-replace tool with a git add --patch-like interface. Regular expressions and capture groups are supported, and re:patch can be used with files and directories. Only Linux is currently supported.

You can install from source or through crates.io. You must have a recent rust/cargo toolchain installed.

# install the latest release from crates.io
cargo install repatch

# install from source
git clone https://github.com/stevenengler/repatch.git
cd repatch && cargo install --path .

Similar to ripgrep, gitignore rules are respected and hidden files/directories are ignored.

The editor used to edit patches can be configured using environment variables or the git configuration. The search priority is VISUAL, EDITOR, GIT_EDITOR, and git config core.editor. Otherwise vim is used. Like sudo -e the editor value is split by whitespace characters and executed, and is not interpreted by a shell.

Patches shown in the terminal will have ANSI escape sequences replaced with safe versions.

Like most text editors, files are replaced and not edited in-place. This means that the file owner or other metadata may change after editing. The new file will have the same read/write/execute permissions as the original file. You will also need enough temporary disk space for this second file. For example if you're editing a 10 GB file, you must have at least 10 GB of disk space free so that the new file can be written before the original file is deleted.

Large files (larger than the amount of available memory) are supported as long as they have a sufficient number of lines. For example a 10 GB file with 10,000 lines should work fine, but a 10 GB file with a single line might exhaust the system memory and would not look very nice in the terminal.

Most of the heavy lifting is done by the ripgrep family of crates, clap, and diffy.