6

When using emacs Projectile and helm-projectile, I am used to search for text inside the whole project. However is there a way to search only part of the project?

Something like:

  • search inside a subfolder only
  • search while excluding a subfolder
Community
  • 1
  • 1
nha
  • 17,623
  • 13
  • 87
  • 133

3 Answers3

5

Yes you can exclude (sub) folders. Add a line in your .projectile:

-/sub/folder

So search inside a subfolder, I don't see something automatic. You could put project files in some subfolders (https://projectile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration/#file-local-project-root-definitions) and switch projects.

Ehvince
  • 17,274
  • 7
  • 58
  • 79
  • 1
    That could be a workaround, however I need this kind of search only sporadically (and the reason I want this kind of search is to move files around in a big project into separate subfolders). – nha Oct 13 '16 at 08:38
3

For now I am using rgrep, which prompts for a string and a directory to find.

I would be happy to hear about an equivalent solution using ag, and I should mention I haven't yet dug into the link from @goromlagche (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#emacs).

nha
  • 17,623
  • 13
  • 87
  • 133
  • 1
    Personally I didn't find `ack` or `ag` to be any better or faster than Emacs `rgrep` in practice. The most useful thing those other tools do is to automatically exclude files and directories that you wouldn't want to search, and `rgrep` does that too. So while they would be good on the command line, I found I had no reason to integrate them with Emacs. – phils Oct 24 '16 at 22:42
2

Install helm-ag, this requires silversearcher-ag package; for debian apt install silversearcher-ag. And then you can

  1. helm-do-ag to search inside a sub-folder/directory inside project
  2. to ignore sub-folders/directories add them to either .gitignore or .hgignore if it is git and hg project respectively or add then to .projectile file, details here.

references:

  1. https://github.com/emacsorphanage/helm-ag
  2. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
Javed
  • 5,904
  • 4
  • 46
  • 71