I got an idea for an improvement being possibly very easy to implement.
Last week I had to rename a load of files with similar names, mostly search-and-replace operations. The "Advanced Rename"dialog deals fine with such problems. But I'm missing an option to keep it open after applying the changes. I have to re-select the files and doing the whole process again, and the window doesn't keep it's settings from the previous invocation.
It would be useful to have a new "Apply" button next to the "Test" button. So I could select fifty files and replacing all underscores with spaces in the first run, all brackets with braces in the second, and kill some unwanted characters in the third without re-selecting and re-opening the window every time.
This could be done with regular expressions too. But ... maybe there exist people talking actually to their neighbour in regex, but I'm not one of them, and so this is not an option for me.
At the moment you may be able to speed things up a bit with these tips:
Use the Reselect button after each rename to recall the previous set of files. (Note that there may be an issue where it only reselects the files which were changed by the last rename, leaving any which didn't match the From pattern deselected -- I can't remember if that's been fixed yet.)
Even better, make a button which runs
Rename @NODESELECT
This will bring up the rename dialog as usual but won't deselect anything afterwards. You could bind it to a hotkey to speed things up a bit more.
For common tasks like converting underscores to spaces you can create buttons which do the job in a single click and don't deselect the files:
When doing several similar renames in a row, don't forget the Last Rename item in the rename dialog's list of presets. This recalls the last rename operation, including type and From/To strings.