Find files in vim: how to do a partial filename match with Explore **/* - file

I've recently discovered the following to find files in Vim.
:Explore **/[pattern]
Finding files is pretty important to me, and I can't believe I've done without it for 8 years. I can relate to what this gentleman has said: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Find_files_in_subdirectories
I see people searching for files in TextMate and have to hang my head in shame :(
So using the above I'm able to search for files, "in theory", but the output baffles me and often has files that do not match. I'll use a Rails example.
For example doing this:
Explore **/envir*
Yields this, which a bunch of extra weird files:
../
deploy/
environments/
initializers/
locales/
.DS_Store
application.rb
authorization_rules.rb
boot.rb
config.yml
database.yml
deploy.rb
development.sphinx.conf
environment.rb
production.sphinx.conf
routes.rb
sphinx.yml
staging.sphinx.conf
test.sphinx.conf
That is at least usable, I can scroll down to environment.rb and open it.
But say I want to find a list of all helpers. I would think that this:
Explore **/*help*
Would work, but no files are found.
Can someone illuminate me?

Have you look at the Ctrl-P.vim plugin? https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim
This plugins finds files in a similar way to what you show.

No, :Ex[plore] **/foo* sucks.
The above mentioned CtrlP is a beauty (that I use extensively despite a few limitations) that allows you to find files in your project and other niceties. FuzzyFinder and Command-T are worthy alternatives, LustyExplorer as well and there are obviously many others.
But Vim is quite capable by himself. The wildmenu option is key, here. Just add these two lines to your ~/.vimrc:
set wildmenu " see :h 'wildmenu'
set wildmode=list:full " see :h 'wildmode' for all the possible values
With the setting above, the following command shows you an accurate list of matches that you can navigate easily and relatively intuitively.
:e **/foo*<Tab> " see :h starstar
If the "working directory" is set to your project directory, that command is sure to give you good results. It's not very sexy (I like it, though) but it's very effective and dependable. Of course, this method can be used with :sp, :vs or :tabe.
The :find command is even better and probably more suited to yor needs: it looks into the directories defined in the path option. :set path=/path/to/project at the beginning of your session and you can open any file in your project with:
:find foo<tab> " see :h :find
Neat.
Another possibility is to use "args". You add all the files matching some pattern to your "argument list" and use buffer navigation commands:
:argadd ./**/*.js " see :h arglist
:sb foo<tab>
But it can be a little messy.
Overall, there are many elegant ways to deal with file navigation in Vim (and I didn't even mention tags-based navigation!). Plugins may provide a nice unified UI to a number of navigation needs but they are not required for finding files efficiently. At all.
It is interesting to note that both TextMate's and Sublime Text's implementations of fuzzy search are actually limited to the current "project" which is not the case for those Vim plugins or for Vim's buit-in file handling.

If all you want is simple :find type functionality but with partial file name matching with tab auto-completion, the find-complete plugin is good.

Related

Is there a quick file open/find like IntelliJ's find file, or Sublime's? Something with fuzzy search. But in Emacs?

I'm looking for something that's a bit robust in how it finds files in Emacs. I have a project made up a number of different files, and a lot of them. So, I think maybe Emacs would need to cache a lookup or something like that to make a quick find/open facility to work. It would need to also be configured per project to consider only some directories and exclude others inside of this project, since a number of files and directories are generated and hold a massive amount of text and sometimes a concatenated representation of the rest of the code.
Is there a quick file open/find like IntelliJ's find file, or Sublime's? Something with fuzzy search. But in Emacs? That could help with this problem?
Projectile can probably do what you're after. It describes itself as a "project interaction library" with facilities for finding project files quickly.
Try projectile: https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile (see its fancy UI, helm-projectile). You'll have the command projectile-find-file. It is based on projects (they are defined by a .git/.gh/… or a .projectile).
permanent caching ? Yes
filter out directories ? Yes (with a command or a config into the .projectile)
fuzzy search ? Yes, a few: emacs'default, ido, ido-fuzzy, grizzl or helm.
you install it simply with M-x package-install RET projectile RET.
See this EmacsWiki page, which is is a jumping-off place for multiple answers to your question.
Emacs has a built-in file-name cache -- see (emacs) File Name Cache and this page.
See also Emacs bookmarks, and in particular, Bookmark+. You can bookmark any file or set of files. You can bookmark a Dired buffer, including its omit set, markings, and included subdirs. You can bookmark a set of such Dired buffers. You can aggregate bookmarks and use them to perform actions that set up environments etc. They can be triggered in various ways. You can bookmark Emacs desktops. You can tag bookmarks and files & dirs with free-form tags, which lets you organize them flexibly into overlapping sets.
See also this page about project support with Icicles.

How to refactor a Windows batch script littered with GOTOs?

I have to maintain a batch script of about 3500 lines littered with GOTO. Seems that the original "developer" hasn't heard of this famous paper and modular programming.
What the script does?
The script deals with the (silent) installation/uninstallation/reinstallation of several programs using different options. It could be split in several files that deal with each program in part. The problem is that if you're trying to take a part in another file that part will still GOTO another section that needs to be in the original script.
Refactoring?
Normally you wouldn't do a refactoring without having automated tests (so you can be sure you didn't break anything), but I don't know how to do it. There's no testing framework for that.
Partial Solution
I have come up with a partial "solution" that is some kind of adaptation of characterization tests (from Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers) and approval tests:
- create another script: test.py that replaces all commands (like copy or msiexec) with echo,
- redirect the output to a text file (good.txt),
- change the original batch script,
- run the test.py script again and save the output to another text file (current.txt),
- diff good.txt and current.txt -> if there are no differences then I didn't break anything, but if they are different I need to check if I broke something.
Problem with partial solution
How can I capture and replace all the commands? I could make a list of commands to replace, but there are also a lot of string concatenations to get the name and path of the program to be installed.
CMD level capture/hook?
Is there any way I can hook into the command line interpreter (CMD.exe) so I can replace on the fly all the calls to installers with echo?
Other suggestions?
Do I approach the problem in the wrong way? Can I do it better somehow? Do you have some advice I could use?
You could replace all COPY, DEL or CALL with %COPY%, %DEL% ,...
So you can use the same file for production and also for the tests.
#echo off
if not defined UNITTEST (
set "COPY=COPY"
set "DEL=DEL"
set "CALL=CALL"
)
%COPY% src dest
%DEL% somefile.txt
%CALL% installer.exe
And from your unittest.bat, you could start it via
#echo off
set "COPY=>>trace.log ECHO COPY"
set "DEL=>>trace.log ECHO DEL"
set "CALL=>>trace.log CALL ECHO "
del trace.log
set "unittest=Active"
call production.bat
fc good.txt trace.log
I'm not an expert in Batch, but I have done my fair share of it. With that said, I can offer a few tips.
Forget trying to do it all at once. Batch is very hard to debug. Echoing out to a log file helps a lot, but it will not capture everything you need if something goes wrong.
Work on breaking out the exe and msiexec calls into self-contained scripts. It is much easier to test the small script for the functionality you desire. Once you have that working, it is simple to call that script from the "Master" script.
Establish a good protocol for passing args to, and return codes from the smaller scripts. If there are common settings needed to be used for all the scripts consider using a central settings file.
GOTOs are not the devil, unless they pass control all over the place. Normally there are two good reasons that I know of to use GOTO’s.
Skip past a block of code that does not need to run.
To SET values into variables. Note there is a bug that can prevent variables from having their value set from within an 'IF' statement block. That little bug caused a big headache for me at one time.
Calls to a label might be better option at times.
Depending on how far back the legacy support is required, consider using Powershell when possible. The power and debugging capabilities of Powershell far out way the benefits of simple scripting of Batch. Which at 3500 lines simplicity has already been lost. You are already looking at Python, so maybe that could be used instead.
If you need a break point, use Pause. ECHO all the settings you need to examine right before the pause. This is as close to a break point I have found for batch.
Echo the command you intend to run to a log file and actually run it.
Write small verification scripts to be used independently or with the “Master” script to confirm you are getting the results you are expecting.
Use the right tool for the job. I like to use EditPadPro, RegexBuddy, and BeyondCompare for batch editing and comparing differences. There free tools that can be used too NotePad++ and Windiff. Making many edits in a file of that size is best handled by a good editor. IE inserting an echo at the beginning of a line that calls a cmd.exe.
Remember it is scripting not programming. While there is a lot of overlap of the two, the same exact approach to a problem may not be viable between the two.
Always make a backup copy of the scripts as a whole before mucking around. A fallback position is greatly appreciated when there is one small bug that you can’t find.
If it ain't broke... well you wouldn't be working on it if everything was working just fine.
Always test changes. And when you are done test it again. After that have someone else test it.
Just my .02. I’m sure someone else can chime in with more advanced advice. My knowledge on Batch has been acquired from the school of hard knocks, supplemented by ss64.com

How to achieve symbol referencing across directories in vim?

Can ctags tag symbols from a directory up in the hierarchy also or is it limited to create tags for current and sub-directories only?
Basically I'm looking for Visual Studio like symbol cross referencing it is very helpful in understanding alien source code flow.
If not Vim, then which other editor should I use?
thanks
Ctags only recurses to subdirectories. But all you have to do is run ctags -R . in your project home directory, and it will create a tags file for your whole project.
You aren't limited to specifying one tags file in Vim. This is an alternative to the other answers; you can just do something like:
set tags=tags,~/wintags,c:/path/to/moretags/etc
So you don't need to take the time regenerating a monolithic tags file when you just want to update your local tags.
Regarding the OP's comment in another answer,
yes thats correct but when i open a file say proj/dir1/def.c and press ctrl+] on a function name which is defined say in proj/dir2/abc.c, I get tag not found :(
You could also create one tags file for all of your projects at the 'proj' root:
set tags=tags;c:/path/to/proj
This will use the first file named tags that it finds as it walks up the directory hierarchy from where you are.
You can combine these two techniques to have a project-local tags file and then a "global" tags file that isn't updated as often.
Whilst it's got similar user interface for asking it to do it's thing, so you need to actually specify "go down directories", I find that cscope is a very nice tool, whcih does everything that ctags does and a bit more.
ctags (well, exctags at least) can create tags for as many directory trees you want. Simply run
exctags -R dir1 dir2 ...
Then vim knows about all the symbols you need. For example, one of the directories could be /usr/include in addition to your own source directory.
Make sure to run vim path/to/file.c from the same directory you created the tags file in.

How can git be configured to ignore files?

There are some files we want ignored, not tracked, by git, and we are having trouble figuring out how to do that.
We have some third-party C library which is unpacked and we have it in Git. But when you configure && make it, it produces many new files. How to write .gitignore to track source files and not the new stuff. (it's not like forbidding *.o)
Edit: There are at least 12 file-types. So we would like NOT to enumerate, which type we want and which not.
Use ! to include all the types of files you need. Something like in the following example"
*
!*.c
!*.h
Explicitly specifying which files should be tracked and ignoring all others might be a solution. * says ignore everything and subsequent lines specify files and directories which should not be ignored. Wildcards are allowed.
*
!filename
!*.extension
!directory/
!/file_in_root_directory
!/directory_in_root_directory
Remember that the order matters. Putting * at the end makes all previous lines ineffective.
Take a look at man gitignore(5) and search for !. It says
Patterns have the following format:
(...)
An optional prefix ! which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again. If a negated pattern matches, this will override lower precedence patterns sources.
I'm not sure why you say "it's not like forbidding *.o", but I think you mean that there aren't any good patterns you can identify that apply to the generated files but not to the source files? If it's just a few things that appear (like individual built executables that often don't have any extension on Linux), you can name them explicitly in .gitignore, so they aren't a problem.
If there really are lots and lots of files that get generated by the build process that share extensions and other patterns with the source files, then just use patterns that do include your source files. You can even put * in .gitignore if it's really that bad. This will mean that no new files show up when you type git status, or get added when you use git add ., but it doesn't harm any files that are already added to the repository; git will still tell you about changes to them fine, and pick them up when you use git add .. It just puts a bit more burden on you to explicitly start tracking files that you do care about.
I would make sure the repo is clean (no changes, no untracked files), run configure && make and then put the newly untracked filed into the ignore file. Something like git status --porcelain | fgrep '??' | cut -c4- will pull them out automatically, but it would be worth some eyeball time to make sure that is correct...

Is there any way to tell IntelliJ IDEA not to look at files during a search/replace or during refactorings?

Basically my question is the topic ^
I have 4 files that are massive. I need to put them in resources under my maven project structure. Whenever I do a string-based refactoring or search/replace... I basically want the IDE to ignore these files altogether.
Yes, I know I can exclude them and do the replacements manually... but like I said, I want to remove any possibility that they can be modified through the IDE (without having to write-protect them I guess, or revert them all the time if the version control says they've been modified).
Is there any way I can exclude these files?
There are two questions there:
1) How to exclude these files in string based refactoring such as search and replace
You can set up a custom scope when you do a find and replace. This custom scope is saved so you don't have to set it up every time you do a find and replace.
Open the find-and-replace window or the find-in-path window and you will see the scope section in the window with "Custom" as the last option. You can select the files that you want to include/exclude here.
2) How to prevent files from being modified in the IDE without write protecting them
This I'm not sure about. You can add them to a separate change list so that they will always be grouped away from your main set of changes or add them to the vc ignore list. But this doesn't stop the IDE from modifying them. Perhaps you should find out what is editing those files and stop that process?
You can mark the directory as Excluded in "Project Structure->Modules"
You can mark this directory as for "Generated Sources Root"

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