fed - (F)inding (ED)itor

Quickly find and edit the files of a project with the editor of your choice. This is optimized for developers for whom their IDE of choice is a terminal screen in Linux and Unix.

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Installation

In the fed directory, type make install. This will copy the fed script to /usr/bin/fed.

Initialization

In the root of the project you wish to enable for usage with fed, you simply type fed -init.

$ fed -init

Enter any file patterns that you wish to ignore [default: none]
How to handle multiple matching filenames (fail|ask|loadall) [default: ask]
How to handle files that don't exist (fail|ask|create) [default: ask]

This will create a .fed file in the current directory, which will serve as the root of the project. This file contains the configuration information for fed.

Usage

To use fed, anywhere in the root of the project, type fed filename where filename is the name of a file you wish to enter. fed will then search the entire project directory structure, and load the configured editor with the found file.

Note, that filename can be a partial filename.

For example, if the file you wish to edit is called db_tournament.erl, you could probably get away with typing fed db_tourn.

In the event of more than one file is found with that matching name, then depending on your configuration above, fed will either:

• fail: fail by letting you know which files conflict
• ask: ask you which file you wish to load

Fuzzy Searching

Fed can do fuzzy searching. Using the example above, you could do fed dbtou and it would find db_tournament.erl. Additionally, if you know one of the parent directories, you can separate partial directory names with /, for example fed db/tour would find the file in src/database/db_tournament.erl

Files that don't exist, and file creation

If fed is provided with a file that does not exist it uses the setting above:

• fail: fail and inform the user that the file was not found
• ask: inform the user the file does not exist, and asks which filename to create
• create: will automatically create a file with the provided name,

Assumptions

fed will make the assumption that the editor of choice will end the command with a single filename or a list of filenames. For example, let's say your project contains 3 files: file1.txt, file2.txt, and file3.txt.

If your editor of choice is vim, and you've configured fed to load all files (loadall during configuration) then typing fed file will be the same as typing: vim file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

Configurations

You can manually edit set local (project-specific) and global fed settings with the .fed file in the root of your project or .fedconf in your home directory.

Options that can be set in the .fedconf file are:

• alt_roots - Alternative fed system roots. For example, if a project doesn't have a .fed file at the root of the project, but you commonly use the git versioning system, you could tell fed to stop searching and run with defaults if it finds a .git file. Example: alt_roots=.git. Further, you can specify more than one by delimiting with spaces: alt_roots=.git .hg
• editor - Set the default editor. If no editor is set in a project's .fed file, it'll just use whatever editor is provided. Typically, it's probably good form to let the user decide their editor instead of setting it in the project's .fed file.
• editor(Extension List) - Set the editor for a list of extensions. For example: editor(gif png jpg jpeg bmp)=gimp would set the editor for image extensions to use The Gimp.
• ignore - Set the files you wish to ignore, separated by spaces. Files are specified using regular expressions. Example: ignore=~$ \.beam$ (means to ignore all files that end with a tilde ~ and all files with the .beam extension.
• multiple_matches - How to handle multiple matches. (ask, fail, or loadall). loadall is not currently implemented
• no_exist - How to handle a filename that does not currently exist in the project tree. (create, ask, or fail)

Sample Configuration

alt_roots=.git .hg
editor=vim
editor(jpg jpeg gif png bmp ico)=gimp
ignore=\.beam$ ~$ \.sw\.$
multiple_matches=ask
no_exist=fail

NOTE alt_roots has no meaning in a project-specific .fed file

FAQ

Why not just use the $EDITOR environment variable?

It's perfectly common to use a different editor for different projects and languages. Therefore, you can configure, for example, Erlang and Lisp projects to use emacs while you'd prefer to use vim for PHP, Python, and The Gimp for editing images.

What if I want to provide switches to my default editor

In the "Editor of choice", you can enter switches with the command. For example, you could choose to enable "lisp mode" in vim by making the default editor vim -l.

Then any fed commands would be translated to vim -l filename

What if I want to use a specific editor for a specific execution of fed?

You can force fed to use an editor (or any executable of your choice) by specifying the FORCE_EDITOR environment variable

For example:

FORCE_EDITOR=nano fed some_file.t

In that scenario of what editors are specified in your fed configs, nano will be the editor that's used.

Thanks

Additional thanks to:

• Stefan Schmiedl (@swsch)

TODO

See TODO.markdown

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.markdown

License

fed is licensed under the MIT License

Copyright

fed is copyright 2013-2015 (c) Jesse Gumm (@jessegumm)