Projectile search only part of the project

Question

When using emacs Projectile and helm-projectile, I am used to search for text inside the whole project. However is there a way to search only part of the project?

Something like:

• search inside a subfolder only
• search while excluding a subfolder

Ruella

I don't think searching inside a sub-folder is a proper use-case for projectile. Please consider using any generic library/package to do so e.g. silversearcher-ag/silversearcher-ag-el – Ibeam

@Ibeam could you post a link? Thanks – Ruella

github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#emacs – Ibeam

Answer 1

For now I am using rgrep, which prompts for a string and a directory to find.

I would be happy to hear about an equivalent solution using ag, and I should mention I haven't yet dug into the link from @goromlagche (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#emacs).

Ruella

Personally I didn't find ack or ag to be any better or faster than Emacs rgrep in practice. The most useful thing those other tools do is to automatically exclude files and directories that you wouldn't want to search, and rgrep does that too. So while they would be good on the command line, I found I had no reason to integrate them with Emacs. – Marbut

Answer 2

Yes you can exclude (sub) folders. Add a line in your .projectile:

-/sub/folder

So search inside a subfolder, I don't see something automatic. You could put project files in some subfolders (https://projectile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration/#file-local-project-root-definitions) and switch projects.

Hybrid

That could be a workaround, however I need this kind of search only sporadically (and the reason I want this kind of search is to move files around in a big project into separate subfolders). – Ruella

Answer 3

Install helm-ag, this requires silversearcher-ag package; for debian apt install silversearcher-ag. And then you can

1. helm-do-ag to search inside a sub-folder/directory inside project
2. to ignore sub-folders/directories add them to either .gitignore or .hgignore if it is git and hg project respectively or add then to .projectile file, details here.

references:

1. https://github.com/emacsorphanage/helm-ag
2. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Ga