Getting Ack to Work in Vim on Ubuntu
As a Magento developer I often have need to search through hundreds to thousands of files just to find a specific piece of text. The tried and true work horse for this type of operation is grep. Unfortunately, grep is a bit sluggish when it comes to a directory tree as large as Magento’s. Enter ack. Ack is fast. I dare say ack is wickedly fast.
With any great search tool, text editor integration is important. For Vim there’s a great plugin for ack. If you’re running any fairly modern flavor of Ubuntu, when you try the plugin you’ll likely encounter the message ”/bin/bash: ack: command not found”.
According the the instructions on the ack Vim plugin page you have to install it with “sudo aptitude install ack-grep”. After that, you’ll still get “/bin/bash: ack: command not found”. The solution?
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ack-grep /usr/local/bin/ack
After that, you’ll be searching in Vim at blazing speeds.
Thanks! iv tried using an alias but I guess that vim doesn’t see that.
Thanks a lot! It works now
So I’ve delicious-ed this post and referred to it multiple times and realized I never said thanks.
Thanks! I owe you one.
Thanks, that is helpful
Thanks!
Thanks, helps me a lot!
Also you can just:
sudo apt-get install ack
Works at least at Ubuntu 11.10
whoot^2!
For anyone googling for mac OSX, I just reversed the arguments for the symbolic link:
brew install ack
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/ack /usr/bin/ack-grepsupah fast!
Thank you!!!