This looks like a bug in Spine 4.3.23 where the Find and Replace dialog creates folders in the Animations/Skins view simply by updating the search settings preview, even without actually executing the replace operation.
To summarize what's happening: when you enter a regex like ^ with a replacement of folder/, the preview panel on the right side of the Find and Replace dialog appears to be triggering actual folder creation each time the search settings are updated, rather than just showing a preview.
Workaround suggestions until this is fixed:
- Avoid using the
^ (start of string) regex pattern with a folder prefix replacement while iterating on search settings. Instead, finalize your search/replace settings before opening the dialog, then execute it in one go.
- If unwanted folders have already been created, you can undo the changes with
Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac) — try pressing undo multiple times to revert all the spurious folder creations.
- As an alternative approach, you can manually organize animations or skins into folders by dragging them, rather than using Find and Replace for bulk folder creation.
It would be helpful to report this with your test.spine file attached, which it looks like you've already done. The issue tracker for the Spine editor is at https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues if you'd like to file it there as well.
For reference, the Find and Replace feature is documented here: https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-tree#Find-and-replace — the intended behavior is that folders are only created as a result of clicking Replace, not from simply updating the preview.
