[TxMt] REQUEST: Scope-based Find/Replace

[Thomas Aylott - subtleGradient]

On Mar 29, 2008, at 10:37 PM, Alain O'Dea wrote:
> I would find it incredibly useful if I could do a Find/Replace such  
> that I could reliably rename symbols like variables and function  
> names. I envision that this would be based on scopes and that it  
> would constrain Find/Replace to exact matches of entire scopes. In  
> Erlang this would enable me to rename variables by doing a Find/ 
> Replace of exact scope match for variable.other.erlang.

Actually, search and replace is more powerful than the scope matching  
in language grammars.
	Find and replace regex can match multiple lines.

What you could do is look at the language definition file and find out  
the regex that's used to scope variables and then modify it to search  
and replace the specific variables you're looking for.

Maybe this could be automated in a command somehow. But, currently  
TextMate wouldn't be able to do what you're asking in any but the  
currently open document, since it doesn't even parse any files that it  
doesn't have open, and a command isn't capable of accessing the parsed  
version of any but the frontmost document anyway.

Maybe you could do something with a ruby script that parses all the  
files in the project or something similar and asks you what variables  
you want to replace.

Personally, I wouldn't touch something like this because of the pain  
that it would take to debug it.