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The Next Generation of File Organization: Introducing Reny

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Remember our previous look into organizing files? At the time, it was with the renamer component embedded deep within the batchmp multimedia suite. It was useful for organizing messy download folders, generating virtual views, and wrangling chronological chaos.

But times change, and tools evolve.

While batchmp continues to be a powerhouse for media processing, the core file management logic inside renamer was just too universally useful to keep locked inside a heavy multimedia package. That’s why it was completely spun off into a dedicated, standalone tool.

Behold reny!

reny takes the existing renamer functionality and packages it into a lightweight CLI application. Free from the heavy ffmpeg dependencies of its predecessor, this standalone version makes it much easier to install and use for general file management tasks.

Here is a look at what the standalone tool brings to the table.

Batch Renaming

reny keeps all the classic batch renaming commands from the original tool, making bulk modifications straightforward.

Regex Replace

When dealing with inconsistently named files across directories, reny lets you use regular expressions to clean them up:

$ reny replace -fs 'test' -rs 'tst' -dc

This will find all occurrences of ‘test’ in filenames and replace them with ‘tst’. The -dc (dry-run) flag lets you preview the exact changes before anything is actually modified.

Padding Numbers

If files are sorted awkwardly in your filesystem (like file_1.txt, file_10.txt, file_2.txt), the pad command ensures numeric sequences sort correctly by padding them with leading zeros:

$ reny pad -md 2 -dc

This forces all numbers to be at least 2 digits (file_01.txt, file_0i2.txt, etc.), fixing file explorer sorting issues.

Indexing

To add sequential numbers to a batch of files:

$ reny index -dc

This prefixes your files with a sequential index, which is useful for organizing photo albums or structured datasets.

File Organization

The signature organization features from the batchmp days remain intact.

Organize by File Type

To organize a mixed directory (photos, videos, music files) by type:

$ reny organize -b type

reny detects whether files are images, videos, audio, or other formats and creates the appropriate subdirectories. It always shows what changes it plans to make and asks for confirmation.

Organize by Date

Chronological sorting works similarly:

$ reny organize -b date --date-format "%Y/%m"

This uses standard Python strftime formatting to create nested year/month directories.

Virtual Views & Dry-Runs

reny retains the ability to generate virtual views.

To see how files would look organized by type, sorted by size descending (-s sd), complete with a size summary (-ss), without actually changing anything:

$ reny -b type -s sd -ss

Virtual view by type:
~/Downloads
  |->/ 2.1GB video
    |-  531MB movie_part1.mp4
    |-  442MB movie_part2.mp4
    |-  357MB presentation.mp4
  |->/ 1.2GB nonmedia
    |-  200MB installer.dmg
    |-  150MB documentation.pdf
    |-  32MB spreadsheet.xlsx
  |->/ 8.0MB image
    |-  4MB high_res_photo.jpg
    |-  2MB screenshot.png
    |-  1MB thumbnail.jpg

The size sorting helps identify which file types are taking up the most space.

Developers’ Quality-of-Life Features

As a standalone CLI tool, reny integrates well into standard developer workflows.

Git Integration

If you’re working inside a Git repository, reny provides three distinct ways to view and operate on your files:

  1. Show git status (-g): Visually inspect which files are modified or untracked. reny bubbles up file modifications to their parent directories, letting you easily see where changes occurred.
  2. Tracked files only (-gt): Filters the view to exclusively show files that Git currently tracks. This helps avoid accidentally touching untracked .tmp artifacts or build folders when bulk renaming.
  3. Modified files only (-go): Filters the view to show only files with active git modifications (similar to git status), hiding all unmodified clutter.

Configuration & Exclusions

To avoid typing the same flags repeatedly, you can generate a local config file in the current directory:

$ reny config -l

This generates a .reny.toml file and opens it in your default editor. You can configure your default sort orders and formatting rules. Without -l, it sets up a global configuration in your home directory.

To ignore certain files or directories:

$ reny ignore

This creates a .renyignore file locally in your current directory, which works like a .gitignore. Add patterns like node_modules/ or *.tmp, and reny will ignore them.

Getting Started

By shedding its multimedia dependencies, reny is now a fast, focused tool for terminal-based file organization.

Ready to get organized? reny is available via Homebrew or PyPI.

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