Renamer

The Dashing Strike Renamer is a simple tool to open a directory as a text file in your favorite text editor, allowing complicated bulk renames using the tools you're already most familiar with.

Usage:

Right click on any folder in Explorer, choose Renamer
This will open a text file in the associated editor that contains one file name per line
Edit this file to your heart's content, but be sure not to re-order the lines
When you save and close the file, Renamer will give you a preview of all of the rename operations it's about to perform
After reviewing the operations, press any key to accept, or simply close the window to cancel

There is no separate installer, the downloaded Renamer.exe below is the program. Place it somewhere you want to keep it (I like C:\bin for various utilities like this), and run it! When run directly, it will add the shell hooks and file associations to the registry. If you move the .exe to a different folder, simply run it again and it'll update the shell hooks to point to the new path. The first time it's run, it will also prompt you for what editor to use (e.g. Sublime Text or VSCode or leave it blank if you prefer the default of Notepad).

Downloads/Links:

Renamer.exe (481kb)
Source code available on GitHub

See Renamer in action:

Technical Details

During setup, it will create the following 3 registry entries, which can be deleted to re-run setup, or manually adjusted as desired (e.g. if you need extra command line arguments to your editor): HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.renamer, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\renamer_auto_file\shell\open\command, and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Renamer\command.

Freely distribute