Org Grep — Kind of M-x rgrep adapted for Org mode

This tool allows for grepping files in a set of Org directories, formatting the results as a separate Org buffer. This buffer is assorted with a few specific navigation commands so it works a bit like M-x rgrep. Optionally, the tool may simultaneously search Unix mailboxes, Gnus mailgroups, or other textual files.

Installation

This tool has been developed on Linux, and likely requires a Unix-like system. Otherwise, one needs compatible find and grep tools, and a shell able to properly decipher the arguments and establish a pipe.

To install Org Grep, just copy org-grep.el somewhere Emacs may find it. Optionally, assign some key bindings to trigger the tool. For one, I added these lines to my ~/.emacs file:

(autoload 'org-grep "org-grep" nil t)
(define-key org-mode-map "\C-cng" 'org-grep-full)
(define-key org-mode-map "\C-cog" 'org-grep)

yet of course, one may choose any other key binding.

Usage

To use this tool, call M-x org-grep or the keybinding put aside for it, and reply to the prompt with a regular expression to search for. Happily enough, Emacs and the grep command use rather similar syntax for regular expressions. Be well aware that all currently opened files in Emacs are automatically saved to disk before that command gets executed.

If the command is given an prefix argument (that is, if C-u is given immediately before the command), the user may interactively edit the grep options. If the user did not configure org-grep-grep-options otherwise, the default option is -i, which ignores case differences while searching. So, if you want to search strictly, use a prefix argument and erase that -i.

There is another command M-x org-grep-full which also search Unix mailboxes and Gnus mailgroups, given the user configured the appropriate variables. The command is separate from M-x org-grep command, giving more control to users who do not like the slowdown.

Both commands create an Org buffer with the found lines, each preceded by the base name of the file containing the line, and the line number within that file.

This is the [browse] view, which is a read-only view. Org Grep also offers the [edit] view and the [tree] view. In all views, buttons on the title line may be used to switch to the other views. (You might want to set org-confirm-elisp-link-function to nil, so avoiding all confirmation requests.) There are also dired buttons which may be added at some places: they normally open Emacs Dired on the proper directory for the line.

Views

In the [browse] view, one may use standard Org commands which do not modify the buffer, including of course those able to follow links. A few extra key bindings are also available:

C-c C-c

For the search hit as identified by the position of the cursor, open the corresponding original file (unless it is already visited, of course), make it the current window, with the cursor left on that line.

C-x `

Move to the next search hit, open the corresponding original file, make it the current window, with the cursor left on the original found line.

.

For the search hit as identified by the position of the cursor, open the corresponding original file with the cursor positioned on the original found line. Leave the cursor within the search results window (but see Caveats below).

n

Move to the next search hit, open the corresponding original file with the cursor positioned on the original found line. Leave the cursor within the search results window (but see Caveats below).

p

Move to the previous search hit, open the corresponding original file with the cursor positioned on the original found line. Leave the cursor within the search results window (but see Caveats below).

g

Save all modified files to disk, then refresh the search hit buffer from the actual contents of the disk files.

e

Switch to the [edit] view.

t

Switch to the [tree] view.

q

Quit the *Org Grep* window, deleting it.

In all Org buffers, command C-x ` uses the contents of an existing *Org Grep* buffer for moving to the next search hit. If that buffer does not exist, or if there is no following hit, the standard Emacs action is used instead: usually moving to the next compilation error.

In the [edit] view, special commands of the [browse] view are no more available, and all standard Org commands may be used. For convenience, all list items are turned into checklist items.

In the [tree] view, like in the [edit] view, special commands of the [browse] view are no more available, and all standard Org commands may be used. In that view, a hierarchical set of headers represent directories, and all hits are shown under the appropriate headers. This is useful to regroup an overwhelming number of hits under projects, or such things. The headers are sorted lexicographically. Also, they get collapsed to avoid deep nesting whenever possible.

Configuration

Org Grep may be used immediately, without any configuration. However, a few Emacs variables may be set prior to, or after loading org-grep.el, for altering its behavior. These variables are:

org-grep-directories

This is a list of directories which the org-grep command recursively searches. The default is to search only within the hierarchy identified by the Org standard org-directory variable. The user may specify nil to defeat Org searches, and then rely on org-grep-extra-shell-commands.

org-grep-ellipsis

This string is used to mark, in the hits buffer, context fragments which have been deleted. The default is an Unicode ellipsis with a space on each side ( … ). You might want to change this if your computer setup does not support Unicode yet. However, do not customize it with a string which appears frequently in your files: all occurrences will be highlighted regardless if the ellipsis was real or not, making the result more difficult to correctly interpret. If the value is nil, context is always shown in full.

org-grep-maximum-context-size

Some matched lines may be long enough to be seen as bringing pollution in the hits buffer, this variable controls how some of the text may get removed. The context fragments in a line come from the text between hits, or between the beginning of a line and a hit, or between a hit and the end of the line. If the size of a context fragment is bigger than the value of this variable (200 by default), the middle part of the context fragment is removed and replaced by the org-grep-ellipsis string. However, if this variable is nil, context is always shown in full.

org-grep-maximum-hits

This integer number sets a limit on the number of displayed hits, as very long Org files may take forever to completely display. The default value is 2500. The value nil removes the limit and all hits are then shown.

org-grep-extensions

This is a list of file extensions to retain for the search, including the leading period. The default is a list containing the .org string as its sole member. If set to nil, all files are going to be searched, whatever their extension may be.

org-grep-extra-shell-commands

This is a list of Emacs Lisp functions provided by the user, meant to further customize searching. Such functions may be used whenever variables org-grep-directories and org-grep-extensions above are not sufficient to describe user needs. The default is nil, meaning that there is no extra searching. Each element in the list is the symbol name for the function. Each function receives the regular expression given to the org-grep command, and returns a string holding a shell command to provide some grep-like output. See at the end of this section for an example.

org-grep-hide-extension

If set to t, the displayed key on each line of the hits buffer it is shown without the extension when it represents the base name of a file. This may have a slight effect on the sort order. This also has an effect on the disambiguation information which gets added whenenever the same key is used to represent more than one file: that information is then the full file name instead of its containing directory. By default, this option is nil.

org-grep-gnus-directory

This string names the directory holding all Gnus mail files. The value is only used with the org-grep-full command. The feature is not used if the the directory does not exist. A common value is ~/Mail. When the feature is used, links from the hits buffer open whole messages, yet without positioning the cursor on the precise hit line. The org-grep-extra-shell-commands mechanics could be used instead to get precise positioning, and more speed as well, but without the comfort of a proper Emacs mode.

org-grep-grep-options

This string provides options for the grep command, and defaults to the -i string. That value may be overriden interactively by calling the org-grep command with a prefix argument. Note that if the user configured functions providing shell commands, such functions should also insert the value of this variable appropriately in the code they generate.

org-grep-rmail-shell-commands

This variable works similarly to the org-grep-extra-shell-commands variable, except that all searched files should then be Unix mailboxes. The value is only used with the org-grep-full command. Limitations about links and positioning also apply, as explained in the description of the org-grep-gnus-directory variable.

org-grep-shell-command

Path to the shell executable for launching commands under the scene. If this variable is nil, which is the default value, the shell is taken from the shell-file-name variable in Emacs, itself initialized the SHELL environment variable. If you are using some shell with unusual syntax, fish for example, you then need to set org-grep-shell to something more traditional, like /bin/sh or /bin/dash.

Extra shell commands

Here is an example of org-grep-extra-shell-commands. Let’s assume that one want to also search the file system for matching file names. The main trick is to fake that the match occurred on first line of found files. The context is left empty, Org Grep then reacts to this little kludge by showing more information about the full file name:

(setq org-grep-extra-shell-commands '(fp-org-grep-in-locate))

(defun fp-org-grep-in-locate (regexp)
  (concat "locate -e " org-grep-grep-options
          " -r " (shell-quote-argument regexp)
          " | sed 's,$,:1:,'"))

This other example for org-grep-extra-shell-commands takes advantage of Git search speed, when files are under the control of a Git repository. The main trick here is to prepend the directory information to the result, as this information would otherwise be lost after the directory changed. Given the repository is located at ~/share/bin/, one could use:

(setq org-grep-extra-shell-commands '(fp-org-grep-in-share-bin))

(defun fp-org-grep-in-share-bin (regexp)
  (concat "(cd ~/share/bin && git grep " org-grep-grep-options
          " -n -e " (shell-quote-argument regexp)
          " | sed 's,^,~/share/bin/,')"))

Purpose, history

Switching to Org, I immediately populated hundreds of Org files with data previously accumulated either as Emacs allout files (or Vim!), Tomboy notes or Workflowy items. The standard Org mechanics for searching a collection of files requires them under the control of the Org agenda. Given my volume of notes, Org mode was crawling, so I had to relax the agenda and quickly develop some other mean for searching.

The first org-grep I wrote was based on Emacs standard M-x rgrep, using hooks and other tricky machinery so it works the way I wanted. Yet, M-x rgrep is limited to a single directory. Moreover, the *grep* buffer does not render Org lines as nicely as Org mode does, and this became critical for some long Org lines using a lot of heavy markup.

So I rewrote org-grep with the resulting output as a genuine Org file. This seems like a cleaner and easier way to proceed.

Caveats

Org Grep is constantly useful to me, yet a few minor problems remain, which I can easily live with. Here are those I’m aware of:

• The cursor does not come back into the resulting buffer, for some navigation commands meant so it does. (save-current-buffer ...) or (save-excursion ...), or even more explicit handling, all fail to bring the cursor back into the current window, seemingly whenever an Org link gets followed within the Lisp form.
• Navigation commands should reveal the goal line in the original Org buffer containing the grep hit, but the line stays collapsed and hidden. It seems that (org-reveal) does not do its job.
• The search string may not be always highlighted in the resulting buffer, depending on its capitalization. This is because case-fold-search is ignored by the highlighting mechanism in Emacs. The first letter of the pattern is recognized in both cases, this slightly alleviates the problem, this does not work for letters outside ASCII.
• By default, the org-grep command internally calls grep with the -i flag, which may slow it down considerably. The difference is very noticeable for me when using org-grep-full; I then use a prefix argument to remove that -i.
• It would be nice to highlight the search pattern in the original Org buffers containing grep hits.
• Relative links are relocated in the hits buffer so they can be followed, regardless of the directory they come from. But this is done only for general links: those internally using double brackets. Implicit or explicit file: links, and also rmail: links, are the only ones to be so relocated. Plain URL-like links are not relocated: I would need some dependable machinery to recognize them.
• The size of any elided text is reduced so the elision occurs on word boundaries. As a consequence, it may happen that very long words prevent elision.
• If the Emacs function rename-buffer is used on a hits buffer, and a new search is launched afterwards, reverting in the renamed buffer partly uses the arguments of the last search, while it should always use the arguments at the time the renamed buffer was created.