ised

WARNING: This project is under active development. Use only in environments where changes can be easily undone (e.g., version-controlled directories).

ised (interactive sed) helps you search and replace text across large sets of files using regular expressions. It provides a live preview of changes, lets you navigate through affected files, and gives you full control over whether changes are applied—one by one or all at once.

• Live, interactive preview: View diffs for each match in real time, similar to git diff. Decide what to change before writing anything to disk.
• Bulk editing with confirmation: Apply changes to the currently selected file, or confirm and apply changes to all matching files at once.
• Regex-based workflow: Use regular expressions to filter files and match content. Supports flexible patterns for large-scale refactoring.
• Safe by default: No changes are applied without confirmation. Accidental replacements are avoided entirely.
• Minimal and focused: Designed to do one job well. No external dependencies. Runs entirely in your terminal.

Installation

If you are on macOS, you can install ised using Homebrew.

$ brew install parksb/x/ised

If you have Rust installed, you can install ised directly from crates.io.

$ cargo install ised

Prebuilt binaries for Linux and macOS are available on the GitHub Releases page. Download the appropriate archive for your platform, extract it, and move the binary into your PATH.

$ tar -xzf ised-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz # for Linux x86_64. if you are on another platform, use the appropriate archive.
$ mv ised-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu /usr/local/bin/ised

Alternatively, you can build from source manually.

$ git clone https://github.com/parksb/ised.git
$ cd ised
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/ised

Layout

ised splits the screen into five main regions:

Keyboard Shortcuts

Replacement

• The <From> field accepts any valid regex (via regex).
• If your regex contains capture groups, the replacement will only affect the matched group, not the entire match.
  • <From>: highlight_(match|diff)
  • <To>: new
  • Input: highlight_match → Output: highlight_new
• You can also use $1, $2, etc. in <To> to refer to capture groups:
  • <From>: (\d+)\s+(\w+)
  • <To>: $2:$1
  • Input: 123 abc → Output: abc:123

Configuration

You can define default filters and behaviors in an optional config file ised.config.toml. These are searched starting from the current directory and walking upward to the root, stopping at the first match.

[files]
glob_filter = [
  "!**/.git/**",
  "*.rs"
]

• files.glob_filter: A list of glob patterns used to pre-filter files on launch. Use ! prefix to exclude files (e.g., !**/*.md). Multiple patterns are joined with , at runtime (i.e. *.rs,!**/mod.rs)
• More configuration options may be introduced in the future, including key bindings, ignored patterns, ...

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the AGPL-3.0 license.