comby-tools/comby

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2670 stars · 74 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Comby is a command-line tool for structural search and replace across ~every programming language using lightweight syntax-aware templates. It understands code structure like balanced delimiters, strings, and comments, making large-scale refactors easier than regex tools like sed.

Use cases

• refactor code across many files with structural patterns
• replace deprecated API calls project-wide
• find nested expressions that regex can't match reliably
• run interactive review of automated code changes
• write one-off codemods for a language migration
• search and transform JSON or HTML structurally

When to choose

• you need syntax-aware search/replace beyond regex across many languages
• you want to automate small-to-large refactors with interactive review
• regex tools like sed struggle with nested parens, strings, or comments

When to avoid

• you need full AST-level transformation with complete parsers
• simple text substitution with sed/grep is sufficient
• you need IDE-integrated refactoring rather than a CLI

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

parser search-engine developer-tools cli developer-tools parsers programming-languages windows cli structural-search-and-replace code-rewriting refactoring codemod parser-combinators multi-language automation macos linux docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="comby-tools/comby")