How can I change multiple filenames simultaneously in Vim?

Question

I have a season of a show downloaded and every episode filename ends with information about the video ([1080p], [Dual Audio], etc). I would like to use Ctrl-V to simply rename all of the files at once, but this seems to be harder than I feel it should...

For starters, I hit the: 'E21: Cannot make changes, 'modifiable' is off' To which I enter: :set ma

Then upon editing said files I'm greeted with the: 'W10: Warning: Changing a readonly file'

This seems to be quite inconvenient for me. Any solutions y'all can point me towards? Much appreciated!

Answer 1

Fern.vim can actually do this by selecting the nodes with - and then calling the rename action. You'll be presented with a buffer with each file/folder on one line. Whatever edits you make to the paths will be the resultant destination. Pretty nifty honestly.

https://github.com/lambdalisue/fern.vim#renamer-action-aka-exrename

Answer 2

The nerdtree view is just a text representation of the files themselves, so you can't just edit the text there. What you can do is perhaps use rename command mm, but it will not allow you to bulk rename files in a convenient manner.

Might be worth checking out other tools, like scripting (perl/python...), or some other tool like midnight commander mc