This week I set out to make a simple batch application for renaming files. Specifically I wanted to rename folders containing episodes of a TV-show. These files tend to have very ugly names, containing the name of the show, the season and episode, the guy who uploaded it and the file type. I want my collection to contain prettier names, and so I decided to make a batch renamer that could make the folder look more appealing.

I decided to make the application using XUL Runner. XUL Runner is made by Mozilla, and is essentially what Firefox and Thunderbird runs in. It lets you create an GUI using XUL, JavaScript and CSS and then run it as an application. Having made a few extensions to Firefox in my time, XUL was a familiar concept and it didn’t take long until I had a simple working version.

Regex Renamer lets you pick a pattern from a drop down list. It will then look for files that match the regular expression, and renames only those files. This means that if you have a folder where all the files have similar names, then you can rename all of them with a single click. The application also lets you create custom patterns, import and export the list of patterns from/to a file.

It’s not the most user friendly application in the world, and it could do with some work on editing the pattern list, and maybe have a cheatsheet on regex built inn. But for a simple application that took less than a week to code up, it works pretty well.

You can download the application for windows below. It should run on any system that XUL Runner runs on, which would include Windows, Linux and OS X, but you need to download XUL Runner for the last two platforms.

RegexRenamer