Using ripgrep within Projects

Given my recent forays into the world of grepping in emacs using
deadgrep
(and hence ripgrep) and my use of find-file-rg
which
feeds into my current completion system of ivy I think the next step
is to try to set up a project and to see if I can gain any advantages
in my workflow.
I am not yet going to dive head first into projectile
but dangle a
tentative pinky into the deep project pools of the built in project
system, namely EDE (Emacs Development Environment).
As I have mentioned before I typically would only be working within a
single directory hierarchy, hence my previous deadgrep
enhancement
of using a defined setq home-dir
variable, but I think it might be
an enhancement if I could leverage deadgreps
use of projects; for
example, wandering around the deadgrep code I found the following:
(defun deadgrep--project-root ()
"Guess the project root of the given FILE-PATH."
(let ((root default-directory)
(project (project-current)))
(when project
(cond ((fboundp 'project-root)
;; This function was defined in Emacs 28.
(setq root (project-root project)))
(t
;; Older Emacsen.
(-when-let (roots (project-roots project))
(setq root (car roots))))))
(when root
(deadgrep--lookup-override root))))
as far as I can tell the default-directory is the current directory of
the buffer which can be displayed by M-x pwd
but it is the
(project-current) that I am more interested in.
A quick investigation and it seems I need to turn on global-ede-mode
and then run ede-new in the top level directory of my prospective
project. This results in the creation of a Project.ede file
containing some project information allowing the setting up of a
collection of source files and instructions on how to build them. For
the moment I’m not too interested in building anything, but more on
how to trigger deadgreps
project logic by enabling this directory
hierarchy as a project.
As part of creating this project file it seems ede-project-directories has also been added to my init file and an extra menu has appeared on the menu bar called Development
Is this all I need?, well lets evaluate the following in the top level folder:
(project-current)
I seem to get a long list of project information, including the project top level directory. Moving down the directory hierarchy and reevaluating the same expression gives me the same directory!
So I am assuming that in my/deadgrep bespoke wrapper, if I now replace:
(deadgrep search-term home-dir)
with:
(deadgrep search-term)
if I create a project in my former home-dir directory location then my former functionality will have been preserved but with the added flexibility of being able to define other project locations, and also apparently subdirectories! this is actually pretty neat :)
Now I have defined a rudimentary project and seems to work well with
deadgrep
will it work well with my other favourite ripgrep
wrapper, namely find-file-rg
? Well there does seem to be some code
to accommodate projects too, namely:
(let* ((dir (if current-prefix-arg
(find-file-rg--read-dir)
(or (let ((project (project-current)))
(when project
(if (fboundp 'project-root)
(project-root project)
(cdr project))))
and yes, it works!, so anywhere I am within the hierarchy of a project I can call up a list of files fed from ripgrep –files into ivy and complete as normal.
As a bonus find-file-rg
allows the passing of a universal argument
and a current-prefix-arg check enables the navigation to any
directory.
In summary then, I can now define a project, I can grep throughout the
project from any file / directory within that project and I can pull
up a list of files within the project all leveraging the power of
ripgrep through deadgrep
and find-file-rg
!