I had to make a large number of changes to a pcb file, and thought of using a text editor. I use Notepad++, but it does not have a multi-line search and replace. I came across a great open plugin : http://phdesign.com.au/npptoolbucket/ that has this feature. I had to move some stitching vias from one net to another, and doing them one-by-one was tedious. Downloading and installing this only took a few minutes, and I opened the kicad-pcb file and a few seconds later it was all done.
Don’t know how come I have been using Notepad++ for so long and never came across this. I thought I wold pass it along, it makes some tasks so much easier. The reason I needed the multi-line feature was to “qualify” what I was replacing and make sure I didn’t replace something else by mistake.
I could have done the same with a Python script, but actually this was way faster!
Just back up the file you are working on, you never know…
I searched the forum and did not come across a reference to toolbucket.
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Notepad++'s search will take characters like \r and \n and spaces into account when searching (and replacing). Before I used other tools, I would use it’s regular expression search/replace in files for setting silkscreen line thickness across our entire library while we were building our standard at my workplace. That’s a cool tool though!