Finding Text in Files Ergonomically - Announcing recent-rgrep

2025-01-17T05:30:00-08:00

Searching for text in a directory tree of files is a commonplace task. For people who use plain text files there are a number of tools that can accomplish this. One such tool that is ubiquitous in Unix-flavored (predominantly Linux and macOS) systems is the command line utility grep. Emacs builds on this with the rgrep command, invoking grep recursively and presenting its results in a grep-mode buffer. In other editors and IDEs, this feature is named “Find in Files” or “Find in Project”.

Recently I went down the rabbit hole of wanting to get the results of rgrep but with the following twist: report the match results in order of recently modified file, descending. The implementation I ended up with is a two-pass solution that’s brute force but effective.

Announcing recent-rgrep, available on GitHub.

Features

Reports matches in order most recently modified files descending (that is, the most recent files are reported first).
Search only in non-binary files.
Avoids searching in common SCM directories (.git, .hg, .svn, .cvs).
Uses the existing grep that you have installed on your system.
Default search is case-insensitive.
Supports usage from both the command line and Emacs.

What about ripgrep?

NGL, you’re likely better off using ripgrep if you have it installed. But if not, then this modest script can achieve the desired result described above.

Closing Thoughts

If this all seems interesting, I invite you to try recent-rgrep out. In practice, I’ve found it to make my searches more effective as I’m usually more interested in the files that I last worked on. While there’s a performance hit with making two passes, I generally don’t encounter it in the places I use it. YMMV.

Introducing regfmt

2022-10-25T11:31:00-07:00

Sometimes a project you've had in the mental back burner for decades calls to you again, but this time you pay attention. So it is with regfmt, a command line utility that I spent this past month working on.

Backstory

While I was in grad school back in the early 1990's the department had prescribed using the AT&T troff tools for writing papers. Among those tools was one called dformat, which enabled you to easily draw out control register-style data formats using a domain specific language (DSL).

dformat was a great tool for its time but over the years got consigned to bit rot and ultimately forgotten by many. Among the reasons for it being forgotten was that it only supported the troff specific pic drawing language and used a make-shift DSL for its input.

Today

The world moved on and settled on other tools for writing and drawing. That said, the fundamentals of computer design haven't changed and control registers are still a thing, so the need to draw them out is still a thing, and drawing them by hand is still painful.

In the intervening time from the early '90s to 2022, I've run into times when I wished I had something like dformat but modern to use for writing technical documentation. What's modern you say? How about having:

a common vector graphics file format output such as SVG which can then be easily converted to a raster format (png, jpg, etc.).
an input specification that is based on a common data serialization language.

In the early summer of 2022, I got to thinking about dformat and how it could be re-imagined for today and realized wow, all the pieces I needed were there:

Use SVG for the output format
Use YAML for the input format
Use CSS to style the output
Implement in Python which has support for all of the above.

In October 2022, I found the cycles to go to work on this.

Announcing regfmt

regfmt is a Python command line utility to generate SVG diagrams for control register-style data formats. It is inspired by the dformat command from the troff family of tools, however re-imagined using contemporary (circa 2022) file formats.

Python installation: PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/regfmt/

Source Repository: GitHub: https://github.com/kickingvegas/regfmt

Example output of regfmt

Features

SVG output
Modern configuration input file formats
- YAML for register configuration
- CSS for styling SVG output

Try it out!

If you need a tool like this, please take the time to try it out. Any feedback would be appreciated!

Requirements

Python: ≧ 3.9

Installation

regfmt supports installation via PyPI. Is is recommend that you do this in a Python virtual environment.

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) pip install regfmt

notes from /dev/null - unix

Finding Text in Files Ergonomically - Announcing recent-rgrep

Features

What about ripgrep?

Closing Thoughts

Introducing regfmt

Backstory

Today

Announcing regfmt

Example output of regfmt

Features

Try it out!

Requirements

Installation