Feature request: Make counsel-locate command configurable

Currently locate is hardcoded, so it's not possible to change the command that counsel-locate uses.
This is inconvenient for OS X and Windows users, as the former might want to use mdfind, and the latter everything.

Reasons to use mdfind:

It's Spotlight's backend, so using it feels very consistent and natural;
locate won't work unless the user manually starts the database. mdfind works out of the box.
its indexing is updated as the file system changes, ie changes are immediately detected and indexed.

I propose two things:

Making the command configurable - in my case, I'd like to set it to mdfind
Auto detecting the OS and setting the appropriate command - it's quite easy to implement and it makes sense: If a Windows user installed everything, of course he will want to use it (otherwise counsel-locate is useless for him); if I'm a OS X user, mdfind is much better and works out of the box.

If you agree with my second suggestion, I recommend using the -name parameter on mdfind - it searches only on filenames (and not content), which makes the search much faster.

I like the suggestion. But I don't have OSX or Windows, so I'll have to trust the contributor's code in those areas.

Feel free to open a PR. I suggest to deprecate counsel-locate-options in favor of a format-style string variable counsel-locate-command.

counsel-locate-options would need to be marked with make-obsolete-variable as an obsolete variable for 0.8.0. counsel-locate-function would still test for it, but also use counsel-locate-command. On releasing 0.8.0, counsel-locate-options will finally be removed.

Cool, I'll open a PR.

@abo-abo

@abo-abo

How should I use counsel-locate-command and counsel-locate-options at the same time?

The issue is that counsel-locate-command (if I understand correctly what you want) already contains the full command (including parameters) - which I find a good idea. But counsel-locate-options don't play well with it - with the current code, it would add the -i parameter to mdfind, causing an error (as there's no such parameter for mdfind), for example.

Here's what I have:

(defun counsel--autodetect-locate-command ()
  "Try to set an appropriate command for `counsel-locate'
depending on the operating system."
  (cond
   ((eq system-type 'darwin)
    "mdfind -name")
   ;; TODO: find a Windows user that
   ;; can test Ivy and the Everything engine
   ;; ((eq system-type 'windows-nt)
   ;;  "es")
   (t "locate -i --regex")))

(defcustom counsel-locate-command (counsel--autodetect-locate-command)
  "Format string to use in `cousel-locate-function'.
   The default value is determined by `counsel--autodetect-locate-command'."
  :type 'stringp
  :group 'ivy)

This is the problematic part:

(defun counsel-locate-function (str)
  (if (< (length str) 3)
      (counsel-more-chars 3)
    (counsel--async-command
     ;; (format "locate %s '%s'"
     (format "%s %s '%s'"
             counsel-locate-command
             ;; (mapconcat #'identity counsel-locate-options " ")
             ""
             (counsel-unquote-regex-parens
              (ivy--regex str))))
    '("" "working...")))

Note that I commented the line that would add the parameters.

Here's counsel-locate-options (as it is now)

(defcustom counsel-locate-options (if (eq system-type 'darwin)
                                      '("-i")
                                    '("-i" "--regex"))
  "Command line options for `locate`."
  :group 'ivy
  :type  '(repeat string))

Should I just remove the darwin part? Also, having -i and --regex would be a bit misleading for the user as they are already used in counsel--autodetect-locate-command (so removing them would have no effect).

What do you suggest?

How should I use counsel-locate-command and counsel-locate-options at the same time?

Just remove all uses of counsel-locate-options and leave a warning that it's obsolete.
And make the code work in the same way, i.e. counsel-locate-command should be "locate -i" on darwin and "locate --regex" otherwise.

Right, I'll do that.

Should it use locate -i on darwin? I believe mdfind would be a better default for the reasons I mentioned in the first post, but it will get configurable anyway so it's not a big deal for me.

I think other users are used to locate -i. Is locate/mdfind installed by default, and is either objectively better?

mdfind is the backend of spotlight on Mac OS, so it's installed by default. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

locate is installed by default too.

Those are the killer advantages of mdfind for me:

It is integrated with the filesystem so it gets updated automatically. You create a folder and it is already indexed. There's no need to update a database manually or set long intervals.
It is very familiar for OS X users, because spotlight is widely used and it is its backend
It works out of the box, there's no need to create the database

I found mdfind's results considerably better.
For example, I know I have a file that has git and org is its name, but I don't remember its location. I want to open it. Results:

Andres-MacBook-Air:~ andre0991$ mdfind -name git org
/Users/andre0991/Dropbox/ciencia_da_computacao/org/git.org
/Users/andre0991/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/https:%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsyl20bnr%2Fspacemacs%2Fissues%2F1218.webhistory
/Users/andre0991/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/https:%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Farduino-org%2FArduino%2Fissues%2F2.webhistory

Searching the same string with locate results in 59112 results, and the top ones are not what I want.

I actually stopped using find-files because I can just type the file or directory name using mdfind (with Ivy or Helm, of course) and get the right result.

I could go on and show more examples but it would be great if some OS X users say what they think about this proposal here.

Emacs allows defcustom to have easily select-able pre-configured values. I think it makes sense to have locate as the default one, but mdfind should be easy to customize to.

@abo-abo

@abo-abo OK, I'll set locateas default on OS X.

I don't understand why

(counsel-unquote-regex-parens
 (ivy--regex str))

is used in the locate function. Can't it just use the string that the user entered?

Note: mdfind doesn't support regex.

Can't it just use the string that the user entered?

I think the issue there was that locate has a different syntax for regex groups.

Some old versions of locate don't support --regex. mdfind doesn't either. I'm not sure about es.

So for those cases (or if the user wants to change the default command to one without --regex) the code from my previous post shouldn't run. How do you suggest handling this?

Please have a look. If you wish, you can add a counsel-locate-cmd-mdfind that's similar to counsel-locate-cmd-noregex.

Thanks. I created a counsel-locate-cmd-mdfind for my config.

If you wish, open a PR to add it, so that it's easier for people on OSX to customize.
There's a 15 line limit for people without an Emacs copyright assignment though.

Ah, sure. I'll do it soon.

I do know how to change it, but my vote is that counsel-locate-cmd on OS X should default to counsel-locate-cmd-mdfind

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Feature request: Make counsel-locate command configurable #385

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Feature request: Make counsel-locate command configurable #385

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abo-abo commented on Feb 10, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 10, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 13, 2016

abo-abo commented on Feb 13, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 13, 2016

abo-abo commented on Feb 13, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 13, 2016

abo-abo commented on Feb 13, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 16, 2016

abo-abo commented on Feb 16, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 18, 2016

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Andre0991 commented on Feb 21, 2016

abo-abo commented on Feb 21, 2016

Andre0991 commented on Feb 21, 2016

hmelman commented on Feb 23, 2016

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