Scooter - a personal project

2024-11-13

For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a small but useful TUI application, written in Rust, and I’d like to talk a little about it.

My editor of choice is Helix, which is a brilliant modal text editor built for the terminal - kind of like Neovim, but even faster and with a bunch of great features like powerful multicursor. The one thing to note about Helix, though, is that it doesn’t have a lot of built-in features, and there are no plugins at the time of writing (they’re coming though!). Notice that I didn’t describe this feature minimalism as a downside: I’ve really enjoyed having my editor stripped back to the basics and being forced to implement all of the additional features I want myself, either in my own fork of Helix, through CLI tools or, for find-and-replace, by building my own TUI app.

This is where Scooter comes in, which is my application that allows you to search for some text, either using regex or a fixed string, and add a pattern to dictate which files should be searched through. You can then select which instances found should be replaced. If any of the files change between you making a selection and performing the replacement, Scooter won’t blindly perform a replacement and mess up your files: these instances will be skipped and you’ll see them listed at the end.

You can take a look at it here. Feel free to create an issue if you notice anything strange, and if you like it please consider dropping a star!