Re: [PATCH 0/2] Teach 'git grep' about --open-files-in-pager=[<pager>]

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 26, 2010, 12:46 UTC
Message-ID: <20100326124650.GA12215@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.1003261145500.7596@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 11:48:41AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> This supports opening the results of a 'git grep' directly in a pager 
> (where the pager can be 'vi', too).

This is not an argument against your patch, but you may be interested in an alternate method:

  git grep -n $pattern >grep.out
  vim -q grep.out

The advantage is that the editor understands the output as a "quickfix" list and lets you cycle through the hits (just like you might with compiler errors). The disadvantage is that quickfix is a vim extension, so "less" and stock "vi" can't do this (I imagine emacs has a similar feature). It's also obviously a little more typing, but you can hide it inside an alias quite easily.

I use the same trick to look for "^<<<<<<<", and have vim cycle through merge conflicts (you can also make it quicker by restricitng the grep only to unmerged files).

-Peff