Fast Grepping with Vim

Navigating through code is one of the most common tasks a programmer has during his or her daily work. Therefore, anything to speed up this process is a valuable tool for developers. Here, I’m going to show you how to use the powerful ack command.

Ack

I think the ack command will be a replacement of grep, at least for developers. This is because grep is a general purpose tool without any optimization for a specific task, such as searching code. Ack uses perl regular expressions by default to improve performance. Ack won’t search on version control directories, non-code files, or minified web files, and can recognize the programming language of the file.

Installation

For Mac Users:

$  brew install ack

For Ubuntu users:

$ sudo apt-get ack-grep

Basic Usage

Let’s download some code to try ack.

$ git clone https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt.git

This repository has C and shell code, and Documentation, let’s do a simple search:

$ ack MUTT_SEARCH

You can also be more specific and tell ack what code you are looking for:

$ ack --shell test

Vim Plugin

The best thing to do is to integrate ack with vim. This is so you can use it in your workflows without leaving vim.

Install plugin

I always recommend using a plugin manager. If you don’t use one, start today. You can follow this article to start: http://xmodulo.com/manage-vim-plugins.html

And if you use one, just check the installation process here: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/ack-vim

Plugin usage

The plugin will do the search on the current project. To start a basic search, you must enter on command mode:

:Ack

You also can immediately open a buffer of the first file matching a pattern:

:AckAdd

Ack will open a quicklist window so that you can browse the matches and decide what you want to open. These are the keys to navigate through it:

the_silver_searcher

the_silver_searcher is a “faster ack” according to his author and the benchmark that he shows in the official site: http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/

In case you like this more than ack, you can tell Ack.vim to use it. You just have to add these lines to your .vimrc file:

Vim is one of the most powerful editors available. However, many don’t want to start working with it because of the perceived learning curve, but it’s totally worth it! You will soon thank me and become a vim ninja and code at the speed of light!

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