Emacs & Wgrep

So I just discovered wgrep mode of a grep buffer in Emacs and it’s incredible.

I often use projectile-ripgrep if I need to find something in the project I’m working on. But if I wanted to rename some variables or strings that I grepped I had to go and manually update them or use something like projectile-replace.

But turns out there is wgrep mode that is available from projectile-ripgrep (*rg*) buffer or from *grep* buffer.

In case of you ripgrep you just press letter e and now you can edit anything you want. Then you press C-x C-s and now all the changes are made. Amazing.

Here is an example. Let’s try to find and replace projectile- string in this blog:

Here is what was found (image is clickable)

now I press e and I can edit the buffer. It says this in the message area:

Now I changed few occurrences of the projectile- to project- and pressed C-x C-s and now those two files are edited without me even visiting them.

You can save all unsaved buffers with C-x s

Incredible discovery. I’m going to use it all the time now.

I’m not sure though what kind of feature is this. It’s not a package that I had to install. It’s just there and it works.