Ackr

Ackr is the very minimum subset of grep/ack/rak I can think of for lazy developers.

Description

Grep is a great tool. A very powerful tool. But most of the time, it is too powerful for my needs. I can never remember its syntax nor its options.

Ack is great and powerful too. But here again it has so many options.

As a developer I have really simple needs. As a lazy developer I want the most possible simple tool.

Here comes ackr:

Ackr look for a search term into all text files, into all subfolders, from the working directory
A search term is either a string (in this case Ackr is case insensitive) or a regexp
Ackr has no options
Ackr doesn't search inside hidden folders, but looks to hidden files
Search term is displayed in bold font

It runs on unixes. I guess it won't run on windows.

And one more thing: ackr is not a replacement to grep/ack. If you need grep power, just use grep!

gem install ackr

To look for a string (case insensitive):

$ ackr fixme
lib/ackr/search.rb
   8|   # FIXME Separate behaviours: search / print

README.markdown
  21| $ ackr fixme

Using a regexp (same search as above):

$ ackr /fixme/i

If you want to search only in a specific directory, you can temporarily cd into it like this:

(cd your/path && ackr yoursearch)

To look for a string containing spaces, quote the string:

$ ackr 'string with spaces'

To look for a regex containing spaces, quote the regex:

$ ackr '/regex with spaces/'

or escape the spaces:

$ ackr /regex\ with\ spaces/

When your search string contains some characters special to Bash you will have troubles. For example, instead of:

$ ackr &:active

you must use:

$ ackr '&:active'

Ackr doesn't look into directories. In addition, ackr ignores the following list of directories:

If you want to search into such a directory anyway, simply cd into it and make the search.

Ackr is slow, very slow... May be I will consider performance in a future version.

MIT

Feel free to email Xavier Nayrac with any questions, or contact me on twitter.