A Better Finder Rename

I hear you and I do like giving people what they are asking for.

Unfortunately, while an "undo" feature sounds great and somewhat obvious, it is not the silver bullet that one might imagine.. it would only be an "undo*" (* within system limits, with a long list of assumptions) and as such it would give you a false sense of security.

The "normal" undo feature in an application relies on the assumption that the application has total control over the data and that those operations are revertable only in the same backwards sequence. Also generally when you quit the application, the undo history is lost.

A Better Finder Rename is not the only application that has access to the file system. Far from it. After you perform your rename, you are free to move files and folders, changes names manually, make copies, duplicates, etc.. other programs can manipulate the file system, etc.. all without A Better Finder Rename's knowledge or consent.

Worse than that, if your files are not on a standard APFS or HFS+ file system (NTFS, FAT, NAS, etc.), the new names that A Better Finder Rename requests for your files may not actually be the ones on the file system. Most third-party file systems are mounted via file system drivers that do their own name translations. If you use non-standard characters such as emoji (or accents, umlauts, some punctuation, etc), for instance, the APIs may report that the name change was successful, but the real name on the file system would be different. That makes reversing the change impossible.

A successful undo could thus only be guaranteed on the assumption of a standard file system and nothing having changed since the rename was performed. The sell-by date of that kind of undo would be very short. If you quit the program, it would be gone. A "long lived" undo on the other hand would risk being out of date quickly. If an undo was attempted but failed, it would leave your file system in an unconsistent state, which could be far, far worse than not having an undo at all.

I don't think it is a good idea to include a feature that can only work some of the time, but would have potentially grave consequences if it goes wrong and it would be very hard to communicate those limits properly. Users would expect the feature to work every time and they would be right to be mad when it has worked on dozens of previous occassions, but suddendly stops working.

By far the best way of avoiding renaming problems is to spot problems BEFORE you perform the changes, and that is exactly why A Better Finder Rename goes to such extreme lengths to preview and confirm those changes. An undo feature may sound great, but it just couldn't be 100% reliable and would have the potential of leaving your file system in a huge mess.

As I think you might have noticed, it is not as if I had never considered adding an undo. I think I could even do a fairly decent job at it.. a fairly nifty version of it was on the initial scope for v11.. but it would not be bullet proof.. it would give a false sense of security.. and it would fail for some users, some of the time for entirely valid reasons that those users would be not at all interested in.. and in my book that makes it a bad idea.

Normal best practices for important data have always applied to critical files: Make backups, use version control (or something like Dropbox which has built-in versioning). Moreover, the file name is rarely as important as the file content. If the file names are crucial, you can also use the "save file list" feature to create a permanent record of the name changes, just in case.

I know that is not the answer you want, sorry.

The app does give you a preview of the new file names before it renames them. Of course, you should already be using Time Machine for other reasons, but it'll also give you the undo you seek.

FYI, preview and undo are not the same.

Sometimes after renaming I find I want to rename differently, but I can't start over without undo.

And no, I haven't used TM in years.
I use SD or CCC for frequent clones.