Alternatives

You may find the following tools useful if spacemod is doing too much or too little for you. The primary focus of this list is on editor/IDE-independent tools, and preferably on those which can be composed into more complex shell-scripts.

• spacemod is heavily inspired by fastmod and was specifically built to deal with shortcomings of regex. fastmod is much faster.

• ast-grep is a very easy to use AST-based code search tool.

• comby actually has grammars built-in for various filetypes to understand what wildcards are supposed to match in which contexts. It appears to be "a step up" from spacemod the same way spacemod syntax is a step up from regex. That goes for both expressiveness and complexity.

• codemod is another search-and-replace tool that has language-specific knowledge. It supports both basic regex replacements and more sophisticated transformations written in Python.

• spatch from the PFFF-suite appears to be very similar to comby.

• gritql seems similar to ast-grep.

Other tools in the same space

• Beyond Grep has a table of (regex-based) text search tools. The best one IMO is ripgrep.