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Xcode renaming is good, but in some cases it can’t help.

Often, I go back to using Atom to find and replace, using regex.

1. Find

• Open a file (or a directory if multiple files) in Atom
• CMD+C to copy the string to find
• CMD+SHIFT+F to bring up Find panel

When you bring up Atom’s Find panel, the copied string will be automatically populated in the find field, and best of all – automatically escape regex characters!

See the \ added in the Find textfield:

disease\.cure\(with: "vaccine"\).

NOTE: Make sure the regex mode (the .* option) is enabled.

2. Captured Group

Using the following example, we want to find some functions with string, and refactor them to a simple form:

// Original
disease.cure(with: "vaccine")
disease.cure(with: "mask")

// To replace and become
vaccine.asCure
mask.asCure

To do that, we need to add captured group for any strings (vaccine, mask, etc). We do that with (.*?), capturing the shortest possible string.

We edit Find to:

disease\.cure\(with: "(.*?)"\)

3. Replace

Finally, we replace with:

$1.asCure

The first captured group is $1. If you have more captured groups, you can use $2, $3 etc.