query-replace-parallel

A parallel variant of Emacs’ built-in query-replace and query-replace-regexp.

The package is not yet published on an Elisp package archive, so for now, clone the repository (or download the main query-replace-parallel.el Elisp file) and load it manually.

For example, if you’ve downloaded the main Elisp file to the directory ~/query-replace-parallel, you can use use-package like so:

(use-package query-replace-parallel
  :load-path "~/query-replace-parallel"
  :commands (query-replace-parallel query-replace-parallel-regexp))

See our EmacsConf 2023 talk for more information.

FAQ

Replacing query-replace

query-replace-parallel can be used as a drop-in replacement for the standard query-replace. An easy way to do this is to remap query-replace:

(global-set-key [remap query-replace] #'query-replace-parallel)
(global-set-key [remap query-replace-regexp] #'query-replace-parallel-regexp)

Prefix Argument For Number of Pairs

The prefix argument to query-replace-parallel is treated just as in query-replace, i.e. it determines whether to perform whole-world and/or backward replacements.

If this is something you rarely use, you might like to instead repurpose the prefix argument to explicitly specify the number of replacement pairs to input, and to default to just a single pair without a prefix argument. This removes having to press enter one final time to terminate the usual prompt.

You can use the following advice to achieve this:

(define-advice query-replace-parallel--prompt
    (:override (regexp-flag n) hok/count-arg)
  (concat "Query replace parallel"
          (and regexp-flag " regexp")
          (and (use-region-p) " in region")
          (and n (format " (%d)" n))))

(define-advice query-replace-parallel--read-args
    (:override (regexp-flag) hok/count-arg)
  (let ((n (prefix-numeric-value current-prefix-arg)))
    (cl-loop for i from n downto 1
             for (from to delim backward)
               = (let ((current-prefix-arg nil))
                   (query-replace-read-args
                    (query-replace-parallel--prompt regexp-flag (and (> n 1) i))
                    regexp-flag))
             for pair = (cons from to)
             collect pair into pairs
             finally (cl-return (list pairs delim backward)))))