Emacs recursive project search

Question

I am switching to Emacs from TextMate. One feature of TextMate that I would really like to have in Emacs is the "Find in Project" search box that uses fuzzy matching. Emacs sort of has this with ido, but ido does not search recursively through child directories. It searches only within one directory.

Is there a way to give ido a root directory and to search everything under it?

Update:

The questions below pertain to find-file-in-project.el from Michał Marczyk's answer.

If anything in this message sounds obvious it's because I have used Emacs for less than one week. :-)

As I understand it, project-local-variables lets me define things in a .emacs-project file that I keep in my project root.

How do I point find-file-in-project to my project root?

I am not familiar with regex syntax in Emacs Lisp. The default value for ffip-regexp is:

".*\\.\\(rb\\|js\\|css\\|yml\\|yaml\\|rhtml\\|erb\\|html\\|el\\)"

I presume that I can just switch the extensions to the ones appropriate for my project.

Could you explain the ffip-find-options? From the file:

(defvar ffip-find-options "" "Extra options to pass to `find' when using find-file-in-project.

Use this to exclude portions of your project: \"-not -regex \\".vendor.\\"\"")

What does this mean exactly and how do I use it to exclude files/directories?

Could you share an example .emacs-project file?

Answer 1

(Updated primarily in order to include actual setup instructions for use with the below mentioned find-file-in-project.el from the RINARI distribution. Original answer left intact; the new bits come after the second horizontal rule.)

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Have a look at the TextMate page of the EmacsWiki. The most promising thing they mention is probably this Emacs Lisp script, which provides recursive search under a "project directory" guided by some variables. That file begins with an extensive comments section describing how to use it.

What makes it particularly promising is the following bit:

;; If `ido-mode' is enabled, the menu will use `ido-completing-read'
;; instead of `completing-read'.

Note I haven't used it myself... Though I may very well give it a try now that I've found it! :-)

HTH.

(BTW, that script is part of -- to quote the description from GitHub -- "Rinari Is Not A Rails IDE (it is an Emacs minor mode for Rails)". If you're doing any Rails development, you might want to check out the whole thing.)

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Before proceeding any further, configure ido.el. Seriously, it's a must-have on its own and it will improve your experience with find-file-in-project. See this screencast by Stuart Halloway (which I've already mentioned in a comment on this answer) to learn why you need to use it. Also, Stu demonstrates how flexible ido is by emulating TextMate's project-scoped file-finding facility in his own way; if his function suits your needs, read no further.

Ok, so here's how to set up RINARI's find-file-in-project.el:

1. Obtain find-file-in-project.el and project-local-variables.el from the RINARI distribution and put someplace where Emacs can find them (which means in one of the directories in the load-path variable; you can use (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/some/directory") to add new directories to it).

2. Add (require 'find-file-in-project) to your .emacs file. Also add the following to have the C-x C-M-f sequence bring up the find-file-in-project prompt: (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-M-f") 'find-file-in-project).

3. Create a file called .emacs-project in your projects root directory. At a minimum it should contain something like this: (setl ffip-regexp ".*\\.\\(clj\\|py\\)$"). This will make it so that only files whose names and in clj or py will be searched for; please adjust the regex to match your needs. (Note that this regular expression will be passed to the Unix find utility and should use find's preferred regular expression syntax. You still have to double every backslash in regexes as is usual in Emacs; whether you also have to put backslashes before parens / pipes (|) if you want to use their 'magic' regex meaning depends on your find's expectations. The example given above works for me on an Ubuntu box. Look up additional info on regexes in case of doubt.) (Note: this paragraph has been revised in the last edit to fix some confusion w.r.t. regular expression syntax.)

4. C-x C-M-f away.

There's a number of possible customisations; in particular, you can use (setl ffip-find-options "...") to pass additional options to the Unix find command, which is what find-file-in-project.el calls out to under the hood.

If things appear not to work, please check and double check your spelling -- I did something like (setl ffip-regex ...) once (note the lack of the final 'p' in the variable name) and were initially quite puzzled to discover that no files were being found.

Answer 2

You can get the effect you want by using GNU Global or IDUtils. They are not Emacs specific, but they has Emacs scripts that integrate that effect. (I don't know too much about them myself.)

You could also opt to use CEDET and the EDE project system. EDE is probably a bit heavy weight, but it has a way to just mark the top of a project. If you also keep GNU Global or IDUtils index files with your project, EDE can use it to find a file by name anywhere, or you can use `semantic-symref' to find references to symbols in your source files. CEDET is at http://cedet.sf.net

Answer 3

I use M-x rgrep for this. It automatically skips a lot of things you don't want, like .svn directories.

Answer 4

FileCache may also be an option. However you would need to add your project directory manually with file-cache-add-directory-recursively.

Answer 5

eproject has eproject-grep, which does exactly what you want.

With the right project definition, it will only search project files; it will ignore version control, build artifacts, generated files, whatever. The only downside is that it requires a grep command on your system; this dependency will be eliminated soon.