Emacs wdired is a beautiful thing. You turn a directory representation into an editable buffer and you can do some magic. By magic, I mean you can apply your favourite text-editing commands to a directory and do some file management. Take, for example, batch-renaming. Turn wdired on via dired-toggle-read-only, use something like Magnar's multiple-cursors (or built-in keyboard macros) and commit via wdired-finish-edit (using the often-familar C-c C-c binding). You've now renamed multiple files...
