Visual Replace provides a nicer interface to Query-Replace than the built-in one.
The main improvements are:
The prompt of Visual Replace includes both the text to be replaced and the replacement. This makes it easier to craft possibly complex regular expression search and replace.
You can see the matches and how they’re going to be modified as you edit the command arguments.
To help craft the search string and its replacement, you can navigate between matches with the arrow keys and optionally see the number of matches in the prompt.
You can apply only some replacements, selectively, using keyboard shortcuts, or by clicking on the preview.
You can modify the scope and type of the search-and-replace command, to the full buffer, the region or everything after the point.
Visual Replace is just an interface. The actual replacements are always done by the standard Emacs commands.
Comparison with other packagesWhat seems to be unique about Visual Replace is that the thing to be replaced and the replacement at the same time are modified at the same time. The other packages I’ve found make it a 2-step process in most cases.
visual-regexp also supports a preview, but uses its own search-and-replace mechanism and only supports a regexp mode.
anzu is otherwise very similar to visual-replace. It was abandoned for a long time, but has been recently taken up by a new maintainer.
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