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Ack! Effortlessly search your codebase

My favorite commandline tool for efficiently searching a codebase is Ack. It shows file:line and highlights the matches in the output. When refactoring a solution it is a trusty companion to quickly find all uses of a method, for instance.

It is easy to install with DarwinPorts:

sudo port install p5-app-ack

This puts the ack command in your PATH and you’re ready to go.

Basic usage of Ack

A recurring task is to find all uses of a method or class in a project. As this is simply a substring search, you invoke Ack with:

ack inconvenience_late_payers

and ack quickly starts outputting all the places where this is used. If you add a -i, the search becomes case-insensitive. Use ack --help to see all the many available options.

A bit of configuration goes a long way

Ack is fast because it skips uninteresting files. It is meant for searching for text, and skips version control folders, logfiles, images, and a lot of other stuff you are not interested in when searching through your source-code. However, the backside is you need to configure things once to have support for all your various kinds of source-code.

Adding this small bit of config means .haml, .sass, and Cucumber .feature files are also included when searching.

--type-set=haml=.haml
--type-set=sass=.sass
--type-set=cucumber=.feature

With this in place, you are ready to rock HAML/SSS + Cucumber projects.

Know any extra must-have options or shortcuts I have left out?

Update: added link to official Ack homepage.

chop - efficiently dispense with current git branch

My git workflow includes the hack and ship commands for easy tracking of a shared master branch, and conveniently delivering commits. Feature branches are cheap and fast in git, and I am often spawning new branches to try stuff out or work on unrelated things.

Now, meet chop - for chopping down the current working branch after it has been shipped and is no longer needed. The script changes the current branch to master, and then deletes the branch you was previously on. If you give a branch-name as an argument that will be the new current branch.

#!/bin/sh -x
set -o errexit
CURRENT_BRANCH=$(git branch | grep '\*')
git checkout ${1:-"master"} || exit 1
git branch -d ${CURRENT_BRANCH:2}

I use this small script is multiple times every day, and I really like the name of it. There is not a whole lot of functionlity, but as this is an often repeated action, it makes sense to automate it.

Enjoy!