bug#6823: 24.0.50; Wdired or Dired enhancement

[Drew Adams]

Emacs sorely needs one or more commands that let you rename the
marked files as a sequence (following a pattern).
 
See MS Windows for an example (but we could do better):
 
1. You sort the file list the way you want, to put the files you want to
act on in the right order.  Especially with libraries such as Francis
Wright's `dired-sort-menu.el', you can sort Dired in many different
ways.
 
2. You mark the files you want to rename.  (In Windows you select them.)
 
3. You invoke a rename command, and enter a pattern for the new names.
The pattern includes an optional starting index, which is a whole
number.  In Windows you put the index in parens, which are included in
the file names.  Example: `new name (100)'.  The marked files are named
`new name (100)', `new name (101)'...
 
Obviously, in Emacs we could provide for better patterns and
substitutions than this.  But AFAIK today we offer nothing like this.

If you have 1000 family photo files you want to rename to something like
`2010 Summer Vacation (1000)', `2010 Summer Vacation (1001)' etc. (or
even just `1000', `1001'...), then AFAIK the best you can do now is to
use Wdired and perform query-replace with some fancy replacement
expression.  We should offer something simpler for the common task of
renaming a sequence of files.

 
In GNU Emacs 24.0.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2010-08-02 on 3249CTO
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
configured using `configure --with-gcc (4.4) --no-opt --cflags -Ic:/xpm/include'