How to rename files in VS Code in bulk?

Question

Is there a way to search for ALL .txt files in a project and automatically replace/rename them to .js?

E.g user.txt to user.js

It seems I can't search for a file format in VS Code.
If you know how, please share!

Answer 1

You can use a combination of:

• Filtering the EXPLORER panel to just show .txt files
  • See "Filtering the document tree" section of the VS Code docs
  • See related Stack Overflow post: "Filter files shown in Visual Studio Code"
• Installing and using the Batch Rename extension

For example, given these files/folders:

Steps:

1. Start by clicking on the EXPLORER panel and filtering to just display .txt files

   

2. Select/highlight all the files, then right-click on any selected file, then select "Batch Rename"

   

3. That would open a text file ".Batch Rename.txt" with all the selected files

   

4. Do a regular find-and-replace to change .txt to .js

   

5. Note that the ".Batch Rename.txt" is unsaved. It's like a preview of what the changes would look like

6. Save ".Batch Rename.txt" and it will automatically close

7. The EXPLORER panel should now be empty since it's filtered on .txt

   

8. Remove the filter and the files should now be renamed

   

Answer 2

You could just do it in the terminal.

mv *.txt *.js

Answer 3

You can use find to do this in a terminal recursively.

find . -iname "*.txt" -exec rename .txt .js '{}' \;

refer Find multiple files and rename them in Linux

mv works if you want to just do it in a folder itself.

Answer 4

Old question, I know, but for you or anyone else coming in, if you're okay with using a non-VS Code solution, there's a GUI Windows tool called RegexRenamer that is so well-named, you already know what it does.

It gives you a preview of what the renamed files will look like, and has options to rename everything in subfolders or only the current folder, ignore/include file extensions in the search, and apply the rename only to folders/files or both.

What do you think?