Perfectly understandable. And thanks for the quick response.
And of course what I present here are just my opinions, as much as I personally may think they're valid and correct one.
3. If the regex engine you're using doesn't support something like this, then of course not much you can do. But generally most (all?) user tools for search&replace that I can quickly think of (and regex code/development libraries) allow something like a "fake" backreference to the full match. Usually (in my experience) that's done by something like $0 or \0 (e.g. a capturing group for everything before the first actual capturing group) for tools that otherwise use $n or \n , . It's mostly a convenience thing, so not strictly necessary, but it's a very common one ("why do I explicitly need to indicate the group boundaries when this group is already very clearly defined, and is already a known individual entity to the engine?"). Though, again, yes, if it's not something that your regex engine handles, then it's technically correct, so this does downgrades to feature-request rather than bug.
4. Oh, I like that as a feature, for sure. But I think it should be done only if the user explicitly wants to use it, otherwise it should just be assumed.
If the user didn't explicitly provide the location, then it shouldn't match anything on the input regex. If working on "file.ext" in the current directory then it's called "file.ext", not ".\file.ext". If the user wants to move it somewhere then they don't replace .\(.*) with c:\somewhere\$1 , but rather (.*) with c:\somewhere\$1 . This should carry fine to sub-folders of the current folder.
If not using the current folder (or using sub-folders in the pattern) then the user needs to specify the path explicitly anyway, so no problems there. The ".\" should be a valid destination location (I didn't check if it is now), but shouldn't be matching on the input unless explicitly put there by the user.
5. Since it's posted here as a windows tool, file extensions are very much a separate part of a file name, both for the O/S and for the expectations of the very large majority of users. Files with ".tar.gz" are handled by programs that know how to open ".gz" files, which hopefully also know to notice that the base name ends with ".tar" and what it means (which for practical purposes I think anything that handles ".gz" is aware of). But as far as the O/S is concerned, when making file associations/icons/filters, that file has a ".gz" extension. And file renaming can often includes the desire to change the file name without touching the extension.
