RegEx Renamer for Alfred

If you’re an Alfred user and frequently need to rename files in the Finder, you should take a look at RegEx Renamer

I use this all the time for things like changing case, removing spaces, adding dates, and so on. It’s also helping with my recent decision to consistently name files. I use the following format…

YYYY-MM-DD_NNN_descriptive name here.md

That’s basically a date, topic, and name, separated by underscores. The Topic, “NNN”, can be anything. For me it’s usually a project abbreviation. I of course have many files not named like this. I use RegEx Renamer to prepend the date to the filename using the files creation date. Select the target files in Finder, bring up Alfred and enter

regex (.*)@$cy$cm$cd_JAB_$1{-l}

This takes a file created on say, Jan 3 2013, named “my file.txt” and renames it to “2013-01-03_JAB_my file.txt”.¹

There are many was to rename files, but this one works pretty well for me.