I have been evolving my way through many differing ways of grepping recently from standard built-in greps to a few ripgrep front ends until I finally settled on deadgrep
I am currently an ivy user but as everyone seems to be talking about vertico and the associated completion stack I thought I would give it a try and therefore consult-ripgrep to see it can improve on my deadgrep setup.
Given my recent forays into the world of grepping in emacs using deadgrep (and hence ripgrep) and my use of find-file-rg which feeds into my current completion system of ivy I think the next step is to try to set up a project and to see if I can gain any advantages in my workflow.
I am not yet going to dive head first into projectile but dangle a tentative pinky into the deep project pools of the built in project system, namely EDE (Emacs Development Environment).
I seem to be grepping a lot recently and I think the way I use deadgrep can be improved a little.
Currently deadgrep defaults to a recursive ripgrep from the default-directory which is generally the current directory of the buffer, but I find that by default I tend to mostly want to grep from a top level directory (yes I know, almost like a project!).
I would like to have a typical Find All References type of functionality from my grepping and not to rely on xref as I will not necessarily ever know if any xref functionality is supported for any file that I am working on and for the moment I am not using any connection to an LSP server.
Well this is quite a turn up for the books, I seem to have already quickly moved on from emacs ripgrep-regexp! to something better and that is a package called deadgrep
Now why is this? I hear you all ask, your new grepping workflow seemed perfect, a process of file searching that could last the ages. Well as it turns out that age was more of a collection of weeks.
I have come to the realisation that I can be a little more efficient when it comes to searching for text within files, or as it is known in software engineering circles, grepping!
I am often looking for a string within a collection of files and mainly for a Find All References type of functionality. Typically I would want to accept a string (could be regex) and a directory and the search to descend through all sub directories.
Now I am appreciating the power and simplicity of ripgrep and have it available on all my systems I was hunting around emacs to see the best way to leverage this tool for quick file searching.
Working on a code base that is familiar to me is fine when locating files within emacs as of course I know where to go and when I am not I would typically open up a terminal and use find
