Best multi-rename tool - editing file-list in text $EDITOR
Tools like rnm and regex-rename, or one-liner shell loop like:
for p in *.mkv; do n=${p##*/}; n=<string-manipulations>...; echo mv "$p" "$n"; done
...is how I usually rename stuff, as a typical shell-for-file-management terminal-user.
It's non-interactive and not "visual", as in you kinda have to imagine results, then think of all regex-replace manipulations you need to get there, type all those down, run it, check result, adjust regexps, repeat, ...
This reminds me a lot of how paper-teletype-era "line editors" like ed worked, and there's a good reason why most people use interactive editors for text manipulation tasks like that by now instead.
So in that spirit, as the need to organize some files arose again, decided to write a small script to easily delegate mass file/dir renames to an $EDITOR (emacs in my case) - dir-edit.
You give it files/paths to use, or just run in whatever dir, and plaintext filename-per-line list opens, to do any number of search-replaces, multi-cursor edits, minor specific tweaks, etc. Any text editor is great for that.
Tool either waits for $EDITOR to exit, or until file is modified (dir-inotify triggers for file and contents don't match), then prints a diff of old-to-new file-list contents, with a prompt to confirm all renames there:
QUERY: [A]pply changes, [R]eload, call [E]ditor again, [W]ait for more edits, [Q]uit/e[X]it
Unlike with non-interactive tools, you've already seen the results, and done any number of tweaks/corrections by then, so this is mostly a confirmation step, in case of any unnoticed editing mishaps.
Files are still checked for name conflicts afterwards (aborting unless --replace is used), as well as other sanity-checks for recursive renaming (like missing dst dirs, cross-device renames, etc).
File-list is simply matched line-by-line by default, i.e. new filename is expected to be on the same line, but other plaintext option is to tag lines with a small case-insensitive file-id on the right (e.g. my file name.txt #xwz3, which allows to reorder or add/remove lines when editing, only picking up names with those tags intact at the end, which shouldn't be easy to mess-up.
This works great for complicated names of torrented files, which often include all sorts of information, typically not needed locally after download.
Bonus advantage is that while aforementioned rnm/regex-rename ed/grep/sed-style tools do present some kind of "old -> new" info before enacting renames, those never bother to include trickier colorized inline diffs, which fancy diff-tools like delta can easily make (and using "delta" or "colordiff" is picked-up by default if those are somewhere in $PATH), so it kinda beats those at even non-interactive "one regexp-tweak at a time" usage.
Link: dir-edit script in mk-fg/fgtk repo (github) or on codeberg, in local git.