To try the changes out, it's enough to reload dired-aux.el, mark a few files in Dired, type e.g. ! sed 's/?/!/g' RET … and play with the new prompt. Let me know if this UI looks OK, and how the implementation may be improved. Thank you for your patience. Not addressed in this patch series: - letting the user iterate over non-isolated occurrences and selectively substitute them, - allowing '*' to be substituted when surrounded by backquotes, just like '?'. I do find these features valuable (or at least worthy of discussion), however the current bug reports were motivated merely by an inaccurate warning; I'd like to close this first before considering further changes. [1] '?' when not surrounded by whitespace or backquotes, '*' when not surrounded by whitespace. [2] Trying to find the right balance between concision and accurate explanation, considering that some users may not know about the file-substitution feature; also trying to make the highlighting "accessible", i.e. not just relying on colored faces.