Greppability is an underrated code metric

Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by medstrom on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @07:21AM (#41433722)

That's fair, I see many examples in this thread where people pass an exact string directly to grep, as you do. I'm an avid grepper, but my grep tool [1] translates spaces to ".*?", so I would just type "func lart(" in that example and it would work.

An incremental grep tool with just this one transformation rule gets you a lot more mileage out of grep.

[1] https://github.com/minad/consult/blob/screenshots/consult-li...

EDIT: Better demo https://jumpshare.com/s/zMENBSr2LwwauJVjo1wS

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Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by kragen on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @07:33AM (#41433818)

that's going to find all the functions that take an argument named lart or of a lart type too, but it also sounds like a thing i really want to try

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Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by vitus on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @07:50AM (#41433964)

Also, anything that contains "func" and "lart" as a substring, e.g. foobar(function), blart(baz).

It's not far off from my manually-constructed patterns when I want to make sure I find a function definition (and am willing to tolerate some false positives), but I personally prefer fine-grained control over when it's in use.

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Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by medstrom on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @08:04AM (#41434100)

Mmh, I type "func\ lart(" when I need the literal string. But it's less often, so it's fair that it's slightly more to type.

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Re:Greppability is an underrated code metric by kragen on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @08:12AM (#41434156)

yeah!

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