mvi: move interactively

Organising files via the command line can be cumbersome, for many reasons. Editing capabilities on the command line are limited. Characters from foreign character sets cannot be inserted. Arguments may require quoting or escaping. Names may be mistaken for flags.

Mvi aims to simplify bulk renames of files and directories by opening the directory listing in a text editor, thus providing a powerful interface for editing destination paths. Names are changed by editing lines in place. Upon exit mvi will show a list of scheduled rename operations and ask for confirmation before committing the changes to disk.

A lot of care is taken to make sure that mvi does not bail out halfway through an operation. File targets are checked for availability before starting a commit - mvi will never overwrite a file. In case of an unexpected IO error mvi will return to the editor for manual resolution, from where it can pick up with the remaining move operations.

examples

The equivalence of mv bar baz in mvi involves an edit of the first line "bar" into "baz" (not shown, but listed by mvi in summary):

$ ls
bar foo

$ mvi
Line 1: bar -> baz
Proceed: continue/edit/abort c
Moved bar -> baz
Done.

$ ls
baz foo

Swapping lines results in swapping files:

$ ls
bar foo

$ mvi
Line 1: bar -> foo
Line 2: foo -> bar
Proceed: continue/edit/abort c
Moved bar -> bar_
Moved foo -> bar
Moved bar_ -> foo
Done.

$ ls
bar foo

Items can be organized in subdirectories by simply editing a (relative or absolute) destination path including directory separators.

$ ls
bar foo

$ mvi
Line 1: bar -> sub/bar
Line 2: foo -> sub/foo
Proceed: continue/edit/abort c
Moved bar -> sub/bar
Moved foo -> sub/foo
Done.

$ ls
sub/

installation

Mvi is available on pypi for installation via pip:

$ pip3 install mvi

Note that in externally managed environments (i.e. having Python packages installed via apt or similar) you may need to add --break-system-packages to step over pip's guard rails. Alternatively you can use pipx to install mvi in an isolated environment:

$ pipx install mvi

see also

The rename command that is available in most distributions allows for bulk move operations based on regular expressions.