how create a preference file?

[slimane]

one question, how create a .ackrc style preference file?

[ggreer]

Ag doesn't support this. Instead, you can try using aliases. Also, .agignore files can come in handy.

I'm loathe to add support for a ~/.agrc. The complications are numerous and it doesn't add anything that aliases can't do.

[jfelchner]

@ggreer Sorry to bring this up again after 2 weeks but I didn't want to create a new issue. So my .ackrc looks like this:

--type-add=ruby=.haml,.rake,.ru,.rsel,.builder,.rb,.gemspec,.palette
--type-add=vim=.vim,.snippets
--type-add=html=.html,.html.erb,.html.slim,.html.haml,.mustache,.jst,.ejs
--type-add=js=.js,.coffee,.js.erb
--type-add=css=.sass,.less,.scss
--type-set=cucumber=.feature
--type-set=markdown=.markdown,.md
--type-set=sh=.env,.aliases,.plugin,.completion,.theme,.compdef,.zsh,.sh
--ignore-dir=vendor
--ignore-dir=doc
--ignore-dir=log
--ignore-dir=tmp
--ignore-dir=coverage
--ignore-dir=public/assets
--ignore-dir=public/system
--ignore-dir=public/coffeescripts
--sort-files
--color
--follow
--group
--smart-case

Now obviously the ignore-dir stuff can go away which is awesome:

--type-add=ruby=.haml,.rake,.ru,.rsel,.builder,.rb,.gemspec,.palette
--type-add=vim=.vim,.snippets
--type-add=html=.html,.html.erb,.html.slim,.html.haml,.mustache,.jst,.ejs
--type-add=js=.js,.coffee,.js.erb
--type-add=css=.sass,.less,.scss
--type-set=cucumber=.feature
--type-set=markdown=.markdown,.md
--type-set=sh=.env,.aliases,.plugin,.completion,.theme,.compdef,.zsh,.sh
--sort-files
--color
--follow
--group
--smart-case

But the rest of it is a lot of stuff to put into an alias and it'll also make it quite a bit less readable. Am I doing something wrong with all the type-add stuff? Is that not needed in ag?

[moll]

A config file could help set personal sensible defaults where ag is not executed by hand from the shell, but as (sub)process from elsewhere such as from a text editor. Duplicating and keeping options equal everywhere is a little cumbersome. Creating a separate custom wrapper would be a work-around, but I'm not sure it's the best solution either.

[blueyed]

See #257 for a PR.

[trinitronx]

👍 for this feature... People coming from ack seem to expect a portable way to use their .ackrc with ag, or at least modify & adapt their existing one for use with ag. Aliases are ok for setting default arguments like alias ag='ag --pager="less -SMFRX"', but things can get unwieldy pretty quick if you have a lot of arguments you want to add. I can see that implementing this in a way that has to parse the file would be not very fast and would make it harder to maintain.

Perhaps the implementation could be quick and dirty: simply check for an ~/.agrc file, then if it exists read it and append the lines found to the argv array, then continue as normal. This would let parse_options(argc, argv, &base_paths, &paths); do all the hard work, makes it easier to maintain and allows for future-proof support for other options added later. If the ~/.agrc file doesn't exist, then skip the whole code branch to read it in for speed.

[diego898]

I'd just like to say this would be very useful for me. Its a shame that the only way to do this is with aliases.

[Cxarli]

I'd like to bump this. I'm surprised that such an awesome package doesn't already feature something like this.