I'd love sift to understand .gitignore or similar files for other VCS. Doc suggest using sift --exclude-dirs '.git' --write-config so I could probably manually transfer contents of .gitignore to the sift config, but the problem is: .gitconfig is different for every project while sift config seems to be the same for all projects.

Is there any way to suppress these errors?

Error: cannot process data from file 'some/file.txt': file contains very long lines (no newline in 262144 bytes)

I'm getting tons of these errors, and it makes it hard to see the actual results.

Currently sift scans for config file in home directory and current working directory. Could you incorporate the directory sift.exe is in? It would improve portability.

I/O

echo Saving to: 'hello.sql' | sift --only-matching (?<=').+(?=')
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

Expected

hello.sql

It seems error occurs because cmd.exe fails to process special chars, right?

However the following piece confuses me whether issue is about cmd.exe of Sift itself.

echo Saving to: 'hello.sql' | sift --only-matching -e "(?<=').+(?=')"
Error: cannot parse pattern: error parsing regexp: invalid or unsupported Perl syntax: `(?<`

Not Working: sift --dirs core text // Output: matching strings but skipped --dirs restriction. sift --dirs core -x js text // Output: Nothing

Tested in sift 0.3.2 Tested in following shells:

• Windows Command Line
• Windows GIT Bash
• Powershell

Hello,

I took a look at your benchmarks and they don't quite make sense. You claim you managed to read 35GB of data split over 32 files in under 0.5s? How is this possible? You'd need read speeds of over 70GB/s to achieve this. On normal machine with PCI-Express 3.0 x16 you have ~4GB/s bandwidth, and this is the fastest interface in the computer.

Can you elaborate how you measured these magic results and what setup you used? Thank you

Hi,

I noticed a somewhat weird problem when running sift in Neovim. Initially I thought it's connected with vim-grepper so I opened an issue there.

Marco Hinz noticed that running sift in Neovim doesn't work even without vim-grepper when there's no search path indication.

Basically: :!sift -n foo yields shell returned 1 and no results. :!sift -n foo . works just fine. There is no problem with 'vanilla' Vim.

I tracked the issue to a4bc2b9 - sift built at this point yields the aforementioned error, e109c32 works ok.

My sift binaries were built with go version go1.5.1 linux/amd64 (git checkout COMMIT_ID; rm ./sift; go build).

Sift already includes an option (--count) to display a simple count of results per file. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to then get a single count of all found matches.

Ack currently has this ability by combining the --count and --no-filename options, which is quite honestly very awkward, but it works.

The alternative is to pipe the Sift output to a script that adds all of the lines in the output. Unfortunately, that's quite awkward to do in a linux shell, let alone Windows:

If this feature/option were to be added to Sift, I'd personally suggest not following the Ack way of doing things, as the dual options are awkward and hard to discover, but that's just me. :stuck_out_tongue:

It would be great to select files like (for example):

sift --type=cc,cpp --files=CMakeLists.txt --files=Makefile --ext=mak,def

Currently, one can use multiple --type, --file and --ext, but not mixed. Maybe, allowing creating new types in .sift.conf?

I'm very close to fully replace ack with sift! Great work.

Both Ack and The Silver Searcher have a -g PATTERN command that enables for fast file listing based on expression matching the file path itself, while still keeping in mind configuration settings (like ignoring certain file types from showing in results).

While this -g flag enables these applications to perform quite differently (matching against path/filename rather than actual contents), it allows them to be used in interesting contexts, such as the driver to CtrlP indexing. More info regarding the benefits of this use case are spelled out in @thoughtbot's blog post "Faster Grepping in Vim".

Ack has a --noenv option to allow for ignoring any configuration/settings defined in the environment or in the .ackrc file. Since sift has a similar ability to configure it's usage through a config file, it would be a nice addition to be able to ignore it temporarily.

This is very useful for testing queries with different settings or for relying on a default behavior in a script.

PS: Great tool! I love it!

Sift and macOS 12 do not get along:

user@hel Desktop % sift
fatal error: runtime: bsdthread_register error

runtime stack:
runtime.throw(0x1ed7c0, 0x21)
	/opt/go-1.7.1/src/runtime/panic.go:566 +0x95 fp=0x7ff7bfeff8f0 sp=0x7ff7bfeff8d0
runtime.goenvs()
	/opt/go-1.7.1/src/runtime/os_darwin.go:88 +0xa0 fp=0x7ff7bfeff920 sp=0x7ff7bfeff8f0
runtime.schedinit()
	/opt/go-1.7.1/src/runtime/proc.go:450 +0x9c fp=0x7ff7bfeff960 sp=0x7ff7bfeff920
runtime.rt0_go(0x7ff7bfeff990, 0x1, 0x7ff7bfeff990, 0x1000, 0x1, 0x7ff7bfeffad8, 0x0, 0x7ff7bfeffadd, 0x7ff7bfeffb05, 0x7ff7bfeffb3e, ...)
	/opt/go-1.7.1/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:145 +0x14f fp=0x7ff7bfeff968 sp=0x7ff7bfeff960
user@hel Desktop %

More than happy to provide whatever is necessary to help debug and test.

Sift 0.9.0 standalone download. Brew version seems to work fine.

Currently, a call to swift with echo 'abcde' | sift '(.*)c(.*)' --replace='$1\n$2' results in ab\nde. Instead of a carriage return character, it includes a '\' char followed by a 'n' char.

Expected result: replace \n with a carriage return. ab de

Hello! Thanks for this great utility.

Today I was trying to search for something in repos where I have binaries, archives and loads of source code, and even though the sift skipped the binaries, it didn't skip the archives.

Could somebody look at this issue please?

Thank you!

If I do --exclude-dirs "subdir/subdir2", then the --exclude-dirs gets ignored. It looks like I cannot have / in the directory. Is this expected?

There's a configuration knob to switch this behavior, but on command line one can only enable sift to follow symlinks (--follow). Would it be feasible to add a counter-part command line option to disable this behavior?

Use case: most of the time I'd prefer to follow symlinks but there are some quite rare cases when I do not want this behavior. Editing ~/.sift.conf to achieve this is much more toil rather than putting e.g. --no-follow on command line.

Thanks in advance.