Searching Haml files with ack

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This article describes how you can configure your ack settings to search for additionals files. UPATE: Andy Lester, the author of ack, give me feedback about this article.

Recently I was working on a Rails project and was using Vim with the :Ack <pattern> command to search after a certain typed string “Übreschrift” and would like to replace it with the correct version “Überschrift”. I typed into the console :Ack Übreschrift and I couldn’t find a single match. What went wrong?

Questions to answer

Why couldn’t I find the file with that content? Was I in the wrong directory? No:

$ pwd
-> $HOME/git-repositories/brokenlifts

Did I used the wrong pattern? No, I searched after the right word “Übreschrift”. Did I used the wrong command? No, I tried ack-grep in the terminal to search for other common words like test or string and could only find results in .rb, *.js files but not in `.html.hamlfiles. Tada, found the mistake,ackis per default not configured to include these very special file types. If your pressack -f(thanks [Andy Lester](http://petdance.com/) for this note) you will get the output of all files ack will go through - and this command didn't displayed*.html.haml` files.

Solve problems .ackrc

I created the $HOME/.ackrc and added the entries to include these special filename:

--type-add
html=.html.haml

Now my search worked and I got hits in *.html.haml files for searching the term “Übreschrift”.

Further refinements

Since I’m working with Rails there are other file types like sass, erb, less, scss, .. I would like to include into the search:

--type-add
html=.html.erb,.html.haml,.haml
--type-add
css=.sass,.less,.scss

And there might be directories I don’t want to have in my search path. Let’s ignore them and speed up our search:

# ignore certain file types
--type-set=ignorables=.log,.tmp,.pdf

# ignore whole directories
--ignore-dir=vendor
--ignore-dir=log
--ignore-dir=tmp
--ignore-dir=doc
--ignore-dir=coverage

If you would like to see the specified files for your grep environment search, use ack --help types - this will print all information you need. Here is an example:

$ ack --help types
=>
  --[no]actionscript .as .mxml
  --[no]ada          .ada .adb .ads
  --[no]asm          .asm .s
  --[no]batch        .bat .cmd
  --[no]binary       Binary files, as defined by Perl's -B op (default: off)
  --[no]cc           .c .h .xs
  --[no]cfmx         .cfc .cfm .cfml
  --[no]cpp          .cpp .cc .cxx .m .hpp .hh .h .hxx
  --[no]csharp       .cs
  --[no]css          .css .sass .less .scss
  --[no]elisp        .el
  --[no]erlang       .erl .hrl
  --[no]fortran      .f .f77 .f90 .f95 .f03 .for .ftn .fpp
  --[no]haskell      .hs .lhs
  --[no]hh           .h
  --[no]html         .htm .html .shtml .xhtml .html.erb .html.haml .haml
  --[no]ignorables   .log .tmp .pdf
...

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