2009-05-03

Ubuntu file renamers

 I was planning to do an in-deep review of file renaming tools for Ubuntu, but instead I'll do a quick review.

 The best opensource file renamer for Gnome is Mètamorphose. It's hosted in Sourceforge, not the Ubuntu repositories, but still open source so it's cool, there is a deb file so it's super easy to install.

 It does, everything. It only lacks an scripting language but then again if you have python (or specially ipython) you have unlimited power, provided you are ready to write your own scripts and do your own rollbacks.

 It even does time  and date based renaming. And has plenty of options for special case selecting/unselecting, sorting, etc...

 It also has the best file browser, it doesn't have a context menu option in nautiulus but you can make your own one with the Nautilus Actions Configuration Tool.

 The only weird thing I've found is that trimming/croping is done with the options Search>Position>Replace>(empty string), but that's all.

 Now if you don't want to use software outside of the repositories (but it's worth it!) use PyRenamer.

 PyRenamer's file browser does use the theme icons but it doesn't show dot files/folders, it doesn't do regex. It has most of the options you could need, really, I do a lot of heavy duty renaming so PyRenamer was not enough for me, but it could be all you need.

 But, just the better file browser is enough to pick Mètamorphose.

 GPRename is a Perl/GTK+ option, but it's inferior to PyRenamer in every way, it doesn't do regexes, doesn't use icons at all, it can't HIDE dot files, this makes the file browser useless, it can't process directories and files at the same time, it has less options. Just no.

 Purr is the cutest of the file renamers here, it uses a little window with drag and drop support, which is cute and actually allows you to do renaming of files in disparate directories.

 But is doesn't provide any dynamic text modification options. It can add indexes without zero pading, it can change all extensions to another one, and it can replace every file name with a fixed string (plus an index number) it's simply not useful.

 So there it goes, after 221 days of delaying it I'm blogging about file renamers in Ubuntu.

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