You should be using git grep

Usually when searching through files I use ack which is an awesome tool indeed.

Unfortunately, though ack does indeed work on windows, using it on windows is a painful experience. The main two problems are that it’s slow and the color coding doesn’t work.

I figured I’d try out git grep, with the hope that it might be marginally better. I try my best to at least be familiar with all the git commands, so this is one of those things I had been meaning to do anyway.

I was in for a pleasant surprise when I found that git-grep’s color coding worked and it is extremely fast. I profiled it on linux and I get about an order of magnitude difference for a simple repo. If you use a repo with submodules the difference is even more visible, though possibly you would actually want to search submodules by default.

There are two features of ack that I use regularly. The first is that it doesn’t search files it shouldn’t, like .svn and .git. With git grep that is also the case, though it only works with git checkouts (which is all I have at this point.) The second feature is the ability to do –perl or –js or –java or whatever else. This can also be done easily with git grep, and I may make a bash wrapper called git-ack that just gives the interface of ack with the backend of git grep.

  ack frew --js
  git grep frew -- '*.js'

Sure, it’s marginally longer, but if I do make the wrapper it will just be ‘git ack frew –js’ and given that I have cool shell settings based on the directory I’m in I will set it up such that ‘ack frew –js’ just runs ‘git ack frew –js’

Also, check out the amazing -p argument for git grep; it uses git’s code parsing to include the function that matches are in.

Posted Sun, Aug 14, 2011