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Comment by boucher | Hacker News Reader

How does one add a custom type to ack and get it to stick? Per the man page, I tried:

     ack --type-set objj=.j

Doesn't work. I can append that to a query:

     ack CPWindowController --type-set objj=".j"

And it will search .j files for CPWindowController, but then it immediately forgets .j and the objj type.

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Create a .ackrc file in your home directory. For you, it will contain:

  --type-set
  objj=.j

I found this on the ack-grep man-page in Ubuntu. You can set the ACKRC environment variable to give it a different directory (besides ~) to search for your .ackrc. Each line of the .ackrc is a command-line arg that will be prepended to any specified arguments every time you run ack-grep. If you don't want those arguments for a particular query, pass the --noenv flag to ignore the .ackrc. HTH!

Thanks!

Just something I had a hard time figuring out and seems poorly documented:

    --type-set=scala=.scala # works in .ackrc
    --type-set scala=.scala # doesn't work in .ackrc

...despite the version with one equals being correct command-line sequence. Only seems to matter if you want each flag on a single line in your .ackrc file. Might not be true for everyone.

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