Using Git Grep | Hacker News Reader

Using Git Grep

blog.afoolishmanifesto.com

48 pointsjaytaylor18 comments

I personally use the silver searcher[0], also known as ag, which is .gitignore aware and I find quite quick and useful.

In fact, ag references git-grep in its readme while this blogpost makes no mention of ag. I suspect the author just doesn't know about ag or doesn't want to install an additional less-standard package... I personally find it worth the installation.

[0]: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

There's also an .agignore file which can be in your project folder or in your home directory for systemwide ignores.

Yep, just came here to note ag. ag is fantastic and I have it installed everywhere I might need to grep a tree that's not in git. (ag's author notes that git grep is usually faster, if you're lucky enough to in fact be grepping a git repo.)

> I suspect the author just doesn't know about ag

Actually, the author uses Windows, and ag is a pain to build on Windows. pt[1] (written in go) has drop-in builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

[1] https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher

The main reason for poor windows support is that I didn't own a copy of windows until two months ago. There is a windows fork of ag, but it doesn't compile on *nix: https://github.com/kjk/the_silver_searcher

That said, pt is pretty cool. If that's what works for you, keep using it.

Thanks for that... I am a big fan of ag at work but I had trouble making it work on cygwin at home. This should solve that problem :)

This post was written in Aug 2011. I believe ag wasn't publicly released till Dec 2011.

http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-...

It took me a while to understand that the article's use of "frew" simply was a random placeholder search string. I started looking up those characters in the docs, and becoming annoyed since it made no sense. :)

Also, shameless plug: my Gitbrowser plug-in for the Geany editor/IDE support git grep, and makes the search results clickable in the editor (https://github.com/unwind/gitbrowser).

2nd gen Nexus 7 doesn't like the SSL cert and removing HTTPS redirects back to that version.

In case the author is reading these comments, that's unfortunate. (Chrome for Android, should be current.)

It looks like the server is slightly misconfigured, it isn't serving the required intermediate certificate[1].

Desktop browsers are smart enough to find the intermediate certificate and then verify the chain, but technically I don't think this is part of the spec.

[1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.afoolish...

I'll see if I can fix this when I get a chance. If anyone knows how to fix it for apache 2.2 I'd appreciate it; I can nopaste my config.

k, it's fixed now.

Sorry about that! I'll fix it when I get a chance

I found out about it maybe six weeks ago and have been using it ever since, pretty much every day. Extremely useful.

I invoke git grep with helm-git-grep inside Emacs. Almost instantaneous incremental search across the whole repo.

Git grep also integrates nicely into Vim with Fugitive. It shows the results exactly like :vimgrep.

git grep can be used outside a git repo (git 1.7.8):

  --no-index

I was confused after reading your comment, as I initially ran "git grep" in my $HOME and it worked fine. Then I remembered that my $HOME is managed using git!

Indeed, it doesn't work in a non git directory without the switch. Thanks for pointing it out.

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