It needs to be graphical. No sed, awk, grep, perl, whatever. I know how to use those and I do use them now, but I need to cherry-pick each replace in 300+ files.
I want a tool where I can:
type a search string
type a replace string
select a directory and file extension
and it would recursively go into each file in that directory and its sub-directories, open it and scroll to the place where search string is and offer two options:
replace (and find next)
find next
Nothing more. Reg.exp. support is a plus, but not required.
SOLVED: Regexxer is exactly what I needed. In case someone needs it on Slackware, here's what you need to download and how to compile it (choosing correct version of each dependency can be a PITA)
I think regexxer is exactly what you're looking for:
Regexxer
regexxer is a nifty GUI search/replace tool featuring Perl-style regular
expressions. If you need project-wide substitution and you’re tired of
hacking sed command lines together, then you should definitely give it a try.
See also the screenshot, looks a lot like what you're describing:
Emacs + dired + query-replace-regexp
For complete recipe follow this link (it's rather long, covering all possible alternatives),
jEdit does exactly what you need. It is written in Java and works well in Linux, Windows and OS X (probably other operating systems also).
Lately Kate (if you use KDE) can do it, but in a very tricky way. Go to "Edit>Search in Files", and choose the folder within which your files exist.
The trick is that only after the search results appear, you will find a text box and a button called "Replace checked". This button will do what you want.
I use gVim for this task all the time. I open up all the files at once, then use the commands to perform a subsitution on each file, asking for confirmation. Generally I use < 20 files, so I open them as tabs and use this:
:tabdo %s/foo/bar/gc
gVim works fine on Windows :) My coworkers often use Textpad to do this same thing, but I'd say gVim is much more efficient at it.
If you are a KDE user there's also kfilereplace.
Related
The short version of the question: how can I get icicles to search usefully for files in directories and subdirectories, even if only given a partial match of the filename?
EDIT: The short answer is to use icicle-locate-file in the top level of your directory and use S-Tab (shift-tab) to begin completion rather than plain tab. More details in this answer.
Just as an addendum, I gave up on icicles after this as it took about 10 seconds to find files in the (large) directory tree in question each time I used icicle-locate-file. There may be a way round this delay, perhaps by creating and sets of files 'gathered' by icicles, but I began to feel that the potential benefits were being eroded by the up-front costs of working this out and by the costs of keeping the file sets updated. As the author of icicles points out below, access to *nix's locate command would allow me to use icicle-locate, which is quicker than icicle-locate-file. However, I run on Windows and the Everything utility doesn't work for me. So, back to copious use of IDO and bookmarks that expand to dired buffers.
==========
The longer version... As Emacs (24.3.1) is now my main development environment I have been exploring ways of improving my efficiency, particularly regarding filename completion for some time now. Several excellent answers to this question pointed me to ido-mode and dired-x, both of which I am now using.
Another great recommendation was Emacs' bookmarks. In particular, defining dired buffers as bookmarks and jumping to them using C-x r b mybook1 or even calling C-x r b from the C-x C-f minibuffer (this page was helpful) are two very useful strategies.
A couple of people mentioned anything and its successor helm. I have been unable to get the file location part of either package working on Windows 7. Apparently they depend on the command line version of Everything but this fails for me, as detailed in this question, to which there were some helpful responses but no definitive answers. It seems that it works smoothly on *nix but there's not much discussion of helm-locate etc on Windows. So that counts out helm and anything for filename completion.
Which brings me to icicles. In a question about making find-file search in subdirectories the asker commented that they had taken a look at "ido and icicles, but they seem to work shallowly, only within current directory".
In response to this came a comment on icicles: "you can search for any file on your system, if you want, matching any part of the file name and path" with a pointer to a page on Icicles file name input. While I appreciate the considerable effort that has gone the help pages for icicles, I didn't find this one very useful because it consisted largely of a list of descriptions of icicles functions. What would be useful to me is a tutorial that walks you through finding files.
Let's assume the following.
I am running a Windows 7 installation of Emacs 24.3.1.
I have a top-level directory containing some files and folders. In this case it is c:/iciclestest/.
I know there's a file somewhere in this section of the tree that has "grob" as part of the filename.
I want to use icicles to find this file. I have put (require 'icicles) and (icy-mode 1) in my init file.
So, off we go. Start Emacs in the scratch buffer. Hit C-x C-f. I get a File or directory prompt, with a purple plus sign to the left that I think indicates that this is one of icicles' multi-commands.
Hitting tab gets me this mini-frame, showing me the contents of the current directory.
I hit tab on the folder1 subdirectory and icicles shows me the contents of that, as one would expect.
You can see a couple of files with "grob" in the name.
Right, C-g to clear everything then C-x C-f again. Enter 'grob'. I get a "no prefix completions" message. This surprised me a little because I expected icicles to have some kind of whizzy fuzzy matching like ido-mode.
Okay, maybe I need a different command. Let's try M-x icicle-locate-file, which gives me this prompt:
If I enter 'grob' and hit confirm I just get a new file, as per below.
To recap: what I'd like to be able to do is enter a string and have icicles go and look for files or folders containing that string. My main dev folder has many dozens of directories and thousands of files so a quick find within Emacs would be a godsend.
I realise that the locate command doesn't exist on Windows so functionality will be in some ways limited, but I would have thought a recursive search of files and subdirs from the current dir based on a user-entered string would be straightforward. What am I missing? Am I going about this the right way? Can this be done in icicles?
You need to read the Icicles doc a bit more: use S-TAB instead of TAB for apropos (regexp or substring) completion. That is apparently all you want here: match grob as a substring. (No need for any fuzzy matching for that.)
Since you want files matching grob anywhere under that directory, use icicle-locate-file. Give it that directory as the starting point. (And since you want to match grob anywhere in the file name, use S-TAB for completion.)
Icicles does provide "whizzy fuzzy matching like ido-mode" (in fact a lot whizzier). Ido's "flex" matching is the same as Icicles's "scatter" matching.
You can set the kind of completion you want to be one of the fuzzy-matching types. In the minibuffer, C-( cycles among the prefix-completion methods. M-( cycles among the apropos-completion methods. True fuzzy matching is a prefix completion method. Flex/scatter matching is a poor man's fuzzy matching, and it is an apropos completion method (so use M-( to cycle to it). To change the default matching, so you need not cycle to get the ones you prefer, customize option icicle-S-TAB-completion-methods-alist or icicle-TAB-completion-methods.
In addition to the answer about icicle-locate-file, you can find files that are in marked Dired subdirectories, and their marked subdirectories, etc. recursively, using M-+ C-F (command icicle-visit-marked-file-of-content-recursive), if you use both Icicles and Dired+.
This answer provides the details.
First off, I was about to write a long list of if/else statements in vim and realized that 1) there was a better way to do what I was trying to do and 2) SO would be ripe with help on the subject. So! I have a variety of files spread about like
foo/src/file01.C
foo/src/file02.cc
foo/src/file03.c
foo/include/file01.hh
foo/include/file02.h
foo/include/file03.h
If you notice that the C/H, cc/hh, c/h extension may or may not match then you are keen and I'd like you to please help. I've look at things like the following vim scripts from the Vim wiki for "Easily switch between source and header file" and although I only dumped a few hours into a.vim without success, it doesn't seem that the others would work via the docs on that page. So can anyone help out on how to make this work?
A good lead I had was a quick How to Easily Switch between Header and Source topic, but still couldn't make it work.
I guess what I really want is how to avoid the multiple if statements and use real matching to do what I want. I want to look into another directory and if look for a header file of the same name with any familiar extension if it was a source C/C++ file, or look for a source file of any regular extension if it was a header file. Thanks for your help!
UPDATE: I specifically want to open the file in a new tab. I live on vim tabs!
I recommend using the FSwitch plugin. https://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-fswitch
This does exactly what you need out of the box. It is better than a.vim in more than one way, being a rewrite of the idea behind a.vim.
The link you posted presents it as a solution, too.
I have just installed it to my vim configuration and it does its job well.
Enjoy.
Just to make sure I was using the most current version, I downloaded the latest a.vim script (2.18) and copied it into my ~/.vim/plugin directory.
You can define certain variables in your ~/.vimrc file to get a.vim to recognize alternate file extensions.
To get the files in your example to match their alternates I added the following to my ~/.vimrc:
let g:alternateExtensions_C = "H,hh"
let g:alternateExtensions_hh = "C"
These are global variables that allow you to override what's already defined. You'll have to define
both relationships (they don't work both ways).
You can see what the current mappings are by typing:
:echo g:alternateExtensionsDict
If you need to define other mappings, follow the same pattern. What comes after the underscore is the file extension you're editing. What's in the double quotes is a comma-separated list of alternate extensions.
let g:alternateExtensions_<ext> = "<list,of,alt,ext>"
If you have a different directory structure, you can define what paths to search by overriding the g:alternateSearchPath variable. ../src and ../include are already included by default.
:echo g:alternateSearchPath
To open the alternate file in a new tab:
:AT
By the way, the a.vim script is pretty well documented. You might want to open it up and take a look. I found a setting or two that I didn't know about and I've been using it for years ;o)
I hope that helps.
IMO your best option is to adopt existing scripts to use :tabf instead of :e or whatever the scripts use right now to open the counterpart file. You can also try to make the change configurable and submit it to the script author. (I'm pretty sure many would find the enhancement useful.)
That reminded me of a trick I used very long time ago. Instead of guessing where the corresponding source/header files are, I have used at the top of file special comment containing relative path to the counterpart file. Switching was as simple as finding the special comment, extracting file name and opening it. Problem was similar to yours in that file extensions were not predictable. My rational solution was to stop guessing and denote counterparts explicitly in the source code. (This days I would have probably tried to put the relationship table into an external file with a standard name and look it up in VIM using the upward search.)
Two helpful things
:he 'path'
:he tabfind
So you would do
:set path=../,/usr/include/,/home/buildagent/SDKROOT/mysdk/inc
:tabfind error_codes.h
to open error_codes.h from somewhere exotic without having to specify it. Note how vim globbing is very very flexible, so you might not need mucht
:argadd ./**/*.[h,H] | tab sall
will open all header files under the current directory, regardless of how many levels deep. Be careful running this command on a large tree or with symlinks outside the tree
Maybe is a often repeated question here, but i can't find anything similar with the search.
The point is that i like to use Emacs for my personal projects, usually very small applications using C or python, but i was wondering how to use it also for my work, in which we have project with about 10k files of source code, so is veeeery big (actually i am using source insight, that is very nice tool, but only for windows), questions are:
Searching: Which is the most convenient way to search a string within the whole project?
Navigating throught the function: I mean something like putting the cursor over a function, define, var, and going to the definition
Refactoring
Also if you have any experience with this and want to share your thoughts i will consider it highly interesting.
Br
The "traditional" way of navigating C source files is to use "etags" to make a file called TAGS, then use ALT-. to go to functions across files.
For searching for strings in files, I usually use "grep". You could make a shell script with all the directories you want to search or something if you get tired of typing them in each time.
My projects typically live in git, so I put this together to quickly search them:
;; There's something similar (but fancier) in vc-git.el: vc-git-grep
;; -I means don't search through binary files
(defcustom git-grep-switches "--extended-regexp -I -n --ignore-case"
"Switches to pass to `git grep'."
:type 'string)
(defun git-grep (command-args)
(interactive
(list (read-shell-command "Run git-grep (like this): "
(format "git grep %s -e "
git-grep-switches)
'git-grep-history)))
(let ((grep-use-null-device nil))
(grep command-args)))
There is also the Emacs Code Browser. It makes exploring projects a lot simpler. See here and here for more information.
Regarding searches in the whole project, I find extremely useful the rgrep command.
Also, imenu is quite handy to jump to a function definition in the same file.
These are my 2p.
look to EDE from CEDET - it provide base support for projects...
ECB is too heavyweight for my taste. I have had good results with xcscope. Needless to say it doesn't help too much with Python.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CScopeAndEmacs
In addition to using TAGS as others have mentioned, I find igrep and igrep-find very useful. There is also Emacs' built in grep and grep-find, but I find their interface more clumsy.
My standard search is:
M-x igrep-find some_regexp RET ~/work_area/*.cxx
Which will look for all *.cxx files under ~/work/area, and show results matching some_regexp. Like all the search utilities, it populates a compilation-like buffer you can navigate using C-x ` (aka M-x next-error).
There are many ways that Icicles can help with projects. Likewise, Bookmark+ and even Dired+.
These libraries can help you create, organize, and manage projects, wherever their files and directories might reside. And they can help you navigate and search in various ways.
Some of the features are unique -- quite different from other approaches. I could list some of the project support here, but this is the best place to start.
Background:
It seems that some text editors and IDEs are starting to get more "browser-like" in their features. Specifically, one such feature is the ability to treat ordinary text in an open text buffer as a hyperlink to another file, resource, or even a runnable command.
Programming this as an editor plugin or macro
Since this seems like a good idea, I have started programming some scripts and editor addons to do this very kind of thing, so that the user of a text editor can open or operate on links of the following style:
href="c:/files/foobar.txt" (click to open file)
href="c:/files/foobar.txt" jumpto="34" (jump to a line number)
href="c:/files/foobar.txt" find="Lorem" (jump to 1st line containing word)
href="find_in_files://c:/files" find="Lorem" (show all matching lines)
[[find_in_files://find=Lorem;exten=*.htm*]] (alternate syntax option)
href="redir://c:/files/feebar.txt" (replace current edit buffer)
href="run://c:/files/foobar.jpg" (open in default image editor)
[[run://c:/files/foobar.jpg;runwith=foo.exe]] (alternate syntax option)
Questions:
Is there any kind of emerging convention for forming text-based hyperlinks?
If there is a convention for this kind of thing, is there a published specification?
Is there an implementation of this idea in your favorite editor/IDE?
Is there an alternate pre-existing approach for this idea that does not use hyperlinks?
How is this feature handled in the "grand-daddy" editors? (Vim, Emacs)
Update:
It looks like the question could have been clarified, but it turns out that Emacs Org mode is one specific example of what I was looking for that answers all of my questions.
Emacs' Org-Mode has support for all kinds of Hyperlinks.
There are several script for Vim that add hyperlinks and markup. One of the most popular is Viki.
URLs, such as http://example.com/ (notice SO automatically links that), and sometimes a "www." prefix, just because it's so common. Email addresses are another example commonly recognized.
But not this quasi-xml-attribute stuff you have.
Of course not; once you try and make plain text follow some convention, you no longer have plain text.
Yes, see #5.
Yes, see #5.
It's extremely common for editors, especially programmers' editors, to have scripts, macros, tools, or whatever-they-want-to-call-it. Usually these are not controlled directly by the text in the file, but may use the file, filename, selection, cursor position, directory of the current file, etc. I expect many good programmers use such features without thinking about them anymore.
Mostly it sounds like you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Surely the jumpto="34" and find="Lorem" could be replaced with web-browser-style # and ? marks.
So your second and third example would look like so:
href="c:/files/foobar.txt#34" (jump to a line number)
href="c:/files/foobar.txt?Lorem" (jump to 1st line containing word)
Although, as Roger Pate says above, it does sound like you're solving a problem that doesn't exist.
Emacs also has "find-file-at-point", which you can invoke with M-x ffap
See also LinkD. Nothing fancy like Org. Simple, small.
So I was hoping that some old school Vim'ers could help me out. These are all separate questions and normally I would put them up each on their own but I'm not sure if that qualifies as question whoring here.
Plus I think if you know enough to be asking any of these questions they will all be coming up in the near future:
I have a library I'm writing and a series of applications that use that library. There doesn't seem to be an easy way(from what I can tell) to build a ctags file for the library and build one for each of my applications and make sure one references the other when I'm in vim.
Using gf to open files from command mode is awesome, but a lot of my include files
don't contain the full path. They refer to an include directory I set in the IDE. How can I set this directory as another point for Vim to start looking for files?
Is there a way to compile a file inside Vim and send the output to a buffer? I'm currently using MSVS 2k3 but I'll be porting over to Linux in a few weeks so if this is possible on either system I'd appreciate it.
Re 3)
If you put a makefile in your root dir, you can simply write
:make
This will run make and (iirc) put any errors into a seperate buffer, and make vim goto the first compile error. From there you can navigate all erroring lines using :next-error
Also, see this page
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Vim
and
http://linux.byexamples.com/archives/287/perform-grep-and-make-in-vim/
for details on how to show the result in a seperate console.
1- tags files are independent, and can be used together. See :h 'tags'
I can't tell what is the easy way to build tags files. I have one that consists in using two plugins of mine:
one (draft) plugin that knows how to update C++ tags files (it should be easy to adapt it to other filetypes),
and another (local_vimrc) that helps me define directories-local .vimrc. Thus for any files within a given directory hierarchy, I can adapt the &tags options to use the relevant tag files, and the current tag file that will be rebuilt automatically (or when a keybinding is triggered). (Plugins like project should do the trick as well)
2- :h 'path'
3- :h :make
HTH.
2)
:cd {path}
For help:
:he cd
A few others like :lcd might be better suited. Just scroll down that help page.
This is rather off topic, but might still be useful: if you're using Visual Studio a lot and like Vim, you might want to look at ViEmu. It's the best Vim-emulation for any IDE I've yet seen, and the cost is really low. :) And no, I'm not getting a commission. :P
It's not obvious, but if you open a directory instead of a file, it's nicely browseable.
e.g.
:e . (colon-e-dot)
:e .. (colon-e-dot-dot)
will let you browse from your current directory or its parent.
(understanding that you were probably hoping for a capability to have vim accept e.g.
:e abc.txt
and have it look in several directories, which I don't know how to do.)