dockerfiles VS the_silver_searcher

I'm aware of that approach for Python, and Bundler can be configured to do a similar thing for Ruby. Those are good approaches for development environments (though I generally prefer Docker for those these days), but for system tools I think that's just kind of a hassle and I don't want to do it.

For a tool I install & use, my happy path is "install it with my package manager, and then stop thinking about it". Upgrades will happen whenever I decide to ask my package manager to upgrade everything. (I use Arch Linux, so that's usually once or twice a week.)

Needing to hand-setup an installation like that for a program makes me cranky. I've certainly done it when there wasn't a good alternative (and also occasionally wrap programs in docker containers as well if it's easier - https://github.com/wfleming/dockerfiles), but it's the kind of thing that makes me pause and reconsider whether I really care enough to use whatever the program is.

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If you have trouble finding it among the other stuff happening in the server log, well, so do I! I recommend learning how to programmatically search through your terminal output. Providing a universal method for this is challenging because various tools and terminal emulators implement this functionality differently. Another option would be to use tools like grep or the_silver_searcher (a favorite of mine) to search the file where your dev logs are written to. This file is located at log/development.log in a Rails project.

Some of the examples below use ag, but could just as well use grep or equivalent.

Why guess when [there are installation instructions for various platforms on the README](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#installing)?

Also, although it may not be easy to remember, is this really a problem in practice given the installation count in most contexts is one? If there's a context where it's installed regularly, that's a one-time addition to an install script, Dockerfile, etc. in my experience. Do you have a situation that isn't amenable to that?

The kernel changes a lot, so the books would get outdated quickly. But you can find simple / similar drivers, and read the code. Usually there are some documentation / comments on the headers before the function declarations. The Elixir and the Silver Searcher will help a lot.

URL 🔗 : https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

My "vim" way of finding all the places where a function is being used: using visual mode, marking the function, and passing it to :Ag (silversearcher) The problem with this is that it is not 100% accurate, since it will just look for things with the same name, so I was thinking about using the LSP to make things more robust.

We're fans of ag, The Silver Searcher.

Helm-ag is an interface to the ag, silver-searcher, so check the docs for ag. For example, ag automatically ignore some files if there is a .gitignore with some file patterns, or you could use .agignore.