Re: Indexed search with grep-like output

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 11:06 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2011 22:15:25 +0100
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> > The GNU Id-utils package already does that for searching identifiers
>> > in program source code.  The package comes with id-utils.el, which
>> > implements the Emacs front-end for it, and produces grep-like output.
>>
>>
>> Nice. I have never seen it.
>>
>> However that does not use a modern indexed database that is
>> automatically incrementally updated.
>
> Why does it matter?  mkid is lightning fast; I have it run once a week
> when I'm usually away of my development machine, and it needs only 15
> minutes to index all my tens of thousands of source files in 3
> humongously large source repositories.  With such speed, why should
> one care for incremental updates?  You are being brain-washed by
> producers of slow indexing engines, if you think incremental indexing
> is a must.
>
> The same goes for `locate' DB updates: it needs only 9 minutes to
> generate a DB of 758,000 files on my 2 large disks.


That is good.

However don't you think that most people already have an indexed
automatically updated search engines on their desktop that can be used
for this too? At least that is the case for w32 as you know.

Those search engines does of course not know about the symbol id
format. (But that can be corrected by adding indexing filters.) This
might be a problem, I am not sure.

On the other hand the indexing search engines are used for text
searching which many Org users might find useful.

It looks like less trouble to me installing ruby.