Re: [RFC/PATCH] Fix path prefixing in grep_object

From: Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 26, 2013, 17:07 UTC
Message-ID: <CABURp0okEN7cHF2ZWmk-8jf0QFmJN3p-P2bHvF2BH=ws7ne7wA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABURp0odEGgZO1yWFgXS+akPb4wJHiTLoQcmqBd00oYnPZ77vA@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com> wrote:

> If so, then I would like to point out to you the convenience I
> accidentally encountered using this tool.  Perhaps you didn't realize
> how helpful it was when you chose to use a colon there.

My itch comes from a case where I am looking for references in some other branch and I want to narrow my search.

  $ git grep object origin/master
  origin/master:.gitignore:/git-count-objects
  origin/master:.gitignore:/git-fsck-objects
  origin/master:.gitignore:/git-hash-object
  <8600 lines more deleted>

I find hits in the region that interests me and then I try to zoom in there. Conveniently, the path I want to search is right there on my screen. So I copy the part of the object reference I want to limit my search to, and I try again:

   $ git grep object origin/master:builtin/

Now, I find the file that has the code I wanted. But I want to do something fancier to it than grep, so this time I copy-and-paste the filename into my command line after typing 'git show':

   $ git show origin/master:builtin/pack-objects.c | vim -

But this doesn't work if the delimiter used was a colon.

   $ git show origin/master:builtin:pack-objects.c | vim -

I have to edit my copy-and-pasted text, which means I have think about it a bit, and it interrupts all the other things I was thinking about already. Eventually I might learn to do this edit automatically, except it is not needed most of the time. It is only needed when I provide a tree-path instead of a "branch <space> path". In the latter case, the full path is spelled out for me correctly. And in all other cases the filenames provided by git-grep are valid filenames or object names.