Yeah, I was going to point out some of those same problems.

I wrote the same basic tool about 20 years ago. Since then it has been one of my most heavily-used tools.

It was usually the first tool I missed when I moved to a new environment. And I've been surprised over the years to not run into this functionality by other authors.

I remember missing my precious mvi and thinking, "Oh, vim lets you edit directories, I'll just use that". Gah, what an awkward interface. I can't even do :%s/HTM/html/. I can't use all of the vi features to get all of the file names just right.

So it was nice to finally see this simple idea cross my path. (Surely others have written such a tool, just not that I've run into.)

Over the years my mvi has grown. It is now over 500 lines, actually. It handles all of the cases you outlined. It also lets you copy, link, or delete files. Deleting files leads to the case of "delete b; mv a b" which would be ugly if you did those steps in the wrong order. It deals with very badly named files. It lets you pick whether you want to overwrite files and/or be asked first (it was always important that it be a safe way to rename files -- in fact, I'd often reach for it to do a very simple rename because I knew it wouldn't overwrite even when I didn't have a local equivalent for "mv -n" or wasn't sure what the local equivalent of "mv -i" was).

I'll post the code for it in a bit.

bumby++

Update: Posted at mvi -- mv+vi (+ln+rm+cp+mkdir).