rg.el VS multiple-cursors.el

Sometimes I don't know exactly how to configure a package or which options I should be using. Instead of searching the web for the examples last year I came up with an idea: I started collecting interesting/useful dotfiles~/~dotemacs collections in a single place. You can find the repository at github.com/dorneanu/dotemacs. So what I usually do is to search inside the folder where I've cloned all repositories for specific keywords. For this purpose I use rg.el and some custom function:

I am a newbie to emacs and just last week i installed and learning about emacs. I wanted to search for text across multiple files and exclude certain file types. I have been trying to use https://github.com/dajva/rg.el

rg.el or deadgrep: Emacs interfaces to ripgrep, a grep-like tool that is very fast. This lets us search across a large number of files for a pattern of text. The disadvantage of searching for text is that if you are looking for the method called foo and there are hundreds of them that exist, it can be hard to know which one you really want. On the other hand, at the scale and complexity that you are talking about, I can imagine that more IDE-like tools just start failing.

In this post we see how to rename interactively a function that appears in several files using rg.el and wgrep!

rg.el is an Emacs UI for the cli ripgrep.

Oh that's a good point about quickfix. I do end up going back to vim for that sort of thing too I guess. In emacs I did setup https://github.com/dajva/rg.el which gives you https://rgel.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.0/usage.html#results-buffer to look through results but I've never tried to do something like cnext/cfdo/colder/cnewer in emacs.

I use a different ripgrep integration, rg. It has a menu using transient, just like magit (set it up with (rg-enable-menu)). It makes rerunning the searches with different parameters easy.

You can use the rg.el and change the executable to use the ripgrep-all. For example:

Another option is https://github.com/dajva/rg.el

You'll need to install an extension for it, but yes it does. Here is one example: https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el

For me, the beauty of Beancount[0] is that it's just text files in Git. There's a web UI I use for generating reports, and a Python API with which I hacked together some import/export scripts, but 99% of my interactions with it are via Emacs[1] and Magit.

A ton of repetitive bookkeeping tasks become so much easier when you can copy and paste, or use keyboard macros or something like multiple-cursors[2], rather than have to click tens or hundreds of times in a GUI. Many years ago I used QuickBooks, and basic tasks like importing a bank statement took at least an order of magnitude longer than they do now.

Having my company's books in Git is also huge when it comes to auditing, concurrency, backups, and figuring out where things went wrong when accounts don't balance. As mentioned in another comment: `git diff` is a really powerful tool and it's awesome to be able to check out the books as they existed at a particular point in time. `git blame` is great for when things don't balance. Writing meaningful commit messages and comments keeps me sane when I try to remember a year later why something is recorded the way it is.

The biggest downside—or advantage, depending on how you look at it—is that there's no default or built-in chart of accounts, so you need a certain level of accounting acumen (or professional advice) to set things up at first. I'm pretty sure GnuCash aims to be more plug-and-play, whereas Beancount is more akin to a programming library that you use to build an accounting system that works for you. I agree with the grandparent commenter, who said that text-based accounting is "the best and most flexible accounting experience I've ever had." But the cost of that flexibility is that a certain level of base knowledge is a prerequisite.

[0]: https://beancount.io/

[1]: https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode

[2]: https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el

The original multiple cursors package is amazing for what it is, but it scales very badly. Emacs is efficient when editing at one place at a time (as you'd do normally), and when mc replicates all the edits character-by-character for all the cursors, it does the very opposite of this: many edits all in very different places. It works quite well when using just a few cursors, but going above a dozen of them causes them to be visibly sluggish.

Recently multiple-cursors has been unusable for me on Emacs 29.0.60 (not a release yet). Movements (and possibly other operations) don't work with the following error:

If you intend to use Emacs for this (as opposed to some external script), you're probably better off using the keyboard macros or a regular search&replace instead of multiple cursors (I assume the Magnars flavor of them). As flexible as they are, they don't scale well and they get exponentially slower the more cursors you have. Having 2500 cursors sounds insane.

You can do something similar with multiple cursors.

Then, in *rg* buffer, we transform org-link-expand-abbrev into org-link-RENAMED the way we prefer (we have all the Emacs power, some of us might use query-replace, other might use multiple-cursors.el, other iedit, etc.). And so *rg* buffer looks like this:

There is also multiple-cursors.el, which looks the closest to what you want, but it's also the buggiest.