What I need
a fast/performant way to open any file under a large (git) repo (~9.8k files).
Context
I have tried various solutions, like Textmate.el and find-file-in-repository. I found these solutions via previous SO questions like this and this and through the LocateFilesAnywhere EmacsWiki.
While both solutions work wonderfully for small-to-mdeium repos, in this case they are practically unusable. When I start typing a filename, there's a delay of several seconds before I see any result. And changing any part of the search is very laggy too.
I think the main problem is that on typing any character, emacs/find-file-in-repository starts a shell command (git ls-files...). I really only need to do that when I have stopped typing.
Questions
is there a better library out there for this use-case?
if not, how can I introduce a delay into the command when I'm typing? i.e. while I'm in find-file-in-repository, I want the find-command to be invoked only when I stop typing (let's say a gap of 300ms).
Summary
After I received the three answers I tried them out (also answering my own question as none of the above solutions worked for me). I finally settled for helm-ls-git. Here's a comparison from my point-of-view:
Projectile
took around 30 minutes to index the repo. Since projectile is not aware of .gitignore, the actual number of files is more like 52k.
can be customized but something that just works (i.e. understands git) is preferable
may need to invalidate cache re-index time to time. That would be costly and frequent since new files are added everyday to the repo.
helm-cmd-t
looked good from the description and the source.
hard to install since it's not published in melpa/marmalade etc. More details in this issue I opened up.
GNU Global
Didn't try as it's likely to have the same problems as Projectile (git-unaware, needs it's own "index" that may need to be maintained time to time)
event-jr's answer however opened up some more options: I was unaware of helm till now. Looking at melpa for helm related plugins I found the following:
helm-git
This looked really promising
Was easy to install with package.el since it's in melpa
I also use and love magit - so this looked a good fit.
However, it kept failing with a magit-git-dir: symbol is void kind of error. Did not dive in too much but looks like it needs to be updated. Opened up an issue
helm-ls-git
As the readme says, this is magit independent.
Has been working wonderfully so far. Easy to install (melpa) and is fast.
I use GNU global for this. I have around 20K files in my project. You can run
M-x gtags-find-file and type first few characters. TAB will complete and show all the matching. You can type any characters which is part of the file name and press enter. Will show all the files that contains these characters.
I tried to use projectile for this. But it was way too slow for the 'project indexing'. It didn't complete the indexing even after 1.5 hours and I have to kill it!. Not sure some thing is wrong here. GNU global is much faster and finishes the entire tag creation within 15 min.
You can check out Projectile. It was basically created to provide something similar to C-p, but has a lot of extra project level features as well. First time project indexing will be fairly slow on such a big project, but afterwards Projectile will cache the project files (both on memory and on the hard drive) and subsequent projectile invocations should be nearly instantaneous.
Projectile also has a Helm plugin to display project files and buffers with Helm.
I use helm-cmd-t happily. It will cache the file list in memory. The cache controls are flexible enough for my needs.
I just answered your question about new repo address here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/8025310/903943
It's https://github.com/lewang/helm-cmd-t
Related
Recently, I found that my emacs starts slowly. Sometimes the startup process takes 30 seconds, sometimes 3 seconds. I guess this is related to network enviroment. However, emacs -q can always start up quickly.
This question is like asking "How long is a piece of string". You have not provided anywhere near enough information. Start with telling us which version of emacs and what platform you running on.
You mention that emacs -q starts quickly, so we can assume the slowness is due to your init file. There are a lot of possibilities and no way for us to tell for sure without analysing your init file. However, there are a few things you can do to help identify possible causes.
#Drew's comment about bisecting your init file is a very useful trick to identify the source of a problem in your init file, particularly when trying to track down an error. It can be useful in identifying major contributors to load time when those contributors can be linked to a specific config option or package load etc. It is less useful when the problem is an overly long inefficient init file with too many packages.
Using a profiler as suggested by #legoscia can help identify areas to focus on, but it will still be necessary to interpret and understand what the profiler is telling you.
My suggestions would be to
Additional Packages. Since the introduction of package.el and the emacs package archives, I've observed a tendency for some users to get a little carried away and install lots of packages just in case. run C-h p and go through the packages you have installed. If you don't use any or you see ones there which you no longer want or use, remove them. Each additional package (depending on how they are loaded - see below) will increase your startup time by some amount as each package will need to be loaded. Loading packages you don't need or want will slow down startup time.
Stuff you don't need or understand. Over time, our init file can grow with stuff and we don't remember why we added it or it can be stuff we have copied from others which we thought we might need and forgot about. Every few months (depending on how often you modify your init - maybe more frequently if you make frequent changes, less if you don't) go through your init file and comment out anything you don't need, don't understand or don't rmember why you added it. Just comment it out, don't delete it. Re-start restart emacs and see if it starts faster and whether features or configuration settings you want/need have gone. If there are, look through the stuff you have commented out and see if anything looks relevant. When you find possible candidates, try to work out what the code is doing (look in the emacs manual, use C-h f and C-h v or C-h m etc to try and work it out. If it relates to a specific package, try M-x customize-package and see if there is built in customization which might give you what you want. Even if you prefer to customize things by hand rather than use emacs' built in customization system, M-x customize-group is a great way to find out what customizations are supported by a package and verify you have variable names correct etc.
Learn emacs autoloads. Emacs has this very useful feature called autoload. There are two main ways of loading packages into emacs. The first is to just do a basic 'require'. This will look for an emacs library with the appropriate name and will read it in and evaluate it (it is like adding the file to your init file, so more lines to evaluate, which means increased load time for your init). The good thing about require is that it just loads the whole file and you know that everything gets evaluated. the bad things is that it can in turn require other files, which can require other files and can result in a much longer init time. To try and address this problem, emacs has the autoload facility. Basically, with autoload, you tell emacs that if it tries to execute a command with the name 'foo', it must first load (require) a specific file which you define in the autoload definition. The advantage here is that emacs doesn't try to load the library until you first try to use it, so there is no increase in load time. The disadvantage is that it can mean there is a delay the first time you use a command and it won't work if other parts of your init use the command (well, it will work, but will have no impact on improving load time).
Switch to use-pckage. There is a very useful package called use-package which can help address all of the issues I've mentioned. It helps compartmentalise your configuraiton, simplifies some common configuration tasks and has support for either setting up a package with autoloads or deferring the loading of a package until emacs is idle. It can help speed up your init time considerably provided you use it correctly. Highly recommend giving it a go. See https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package
I'm currently looking for ways to automate some tasks in Eclipse.
For instance, let's say I have a couple of ant files that I'll want to run a couple of times per hour. Being able to assign a hot key to each one of them, so that I could easily run them without having to click, bring the context menu up and click again would bring joy into my life.
Other example would be build/run configurations. I have a couple of them on my project and I'd love to have a way of running each one of them with a different hot key configuration.
Moreover, the very nature of a project I'm currently working on involves a lot of experimentation and trying, so having to click and use my mouse a lot is definitely driving me insane. There are other similar things that I would like to get automated as well (for example, each time I do a commit I'd like to also run some command over my project's folder, etc).
Is there some tool for Eclipse(or outside it) that'll somehow allow me to automate these kinds of tasks? Would Vim for Eclipse help me anyhow?
After some years coding I feel like I have hit a stone wall. I came to the conclusion that I am losing way too much time with my mouse. Yes, I know that a lot of Eclipse actions have correspondent hot keys, but a lot of others don't. I want the ultimate solution !
There are several solutions:
Use a console. Consoles allow to remember the last commands (on Unix, you can even search). So instead of mouse-fu, it's Alt-TabUpReturn
There was Eclipse Monkey to script Eclipse. Not sure if it still works but it might.
On Sourceforge is Practical Macro. No documentation that I could find, though.
EclipseShell might also work, not sure.
Update (Year 2022). Aaron has provided many options in his answer. It seems any of those are working. I am going to try the old ant builder.
https://www.vogella.com/tutorials/ApacheAnt/article.html
Just something that will save changes automatically, while i'm editing say in gedit, or notepad plus plus, or even windows text editor, etc.
I can't seem to find exactly what I'm looking for and svn, bzr, and Git are too complicated. One should be able to start a new project, start writing code, and that's it!
So... I'm going to create a whole new version control system that will be more amazing and simple than all the rest! Unless something already exists? Whether it be online, or a local install, whatevs.
EDIT: Ok, the above paragraph was a bit absurd now that I read it much later. I use Git now, and Git is awesome.
Many text editors will create a backup copy of the prior version when you do a save.
Of course, this is pitiful compared to an actual version control system. You should know that many VCS integrate with editors so commits are very simple quick commands.
The minor time it takes to create a repository is insignificant compared to the time it will save you during the project.
Frankly, this sounds like an argument from ignorance.
I found this nice little Gedit plugin: http://nerdblog.pl/2009/06/01/save-and-commit-to-git-plugin-for-gedit-2-26ave/
From what I can tell from the docs, semantic works by slowly building up an idea of what's in your project by analysing each file (and possibly its neighbours) as you visit them. This is too slow. I'd like to just have it visit all the files in my project. Is there an easy way to do this? Having to visit hundreds of files before I can get decent autocomplete working seems crazy.
I've also got a etags file generated. Can I leverage that somehow?
Relevant info: Emacs on Windows, version 23.2.1
CEDET will automatically parse all files references via #include statements, thus providing pretty good completion. If you are looking to jump around in your files, you can setup CEDET to use GNU Global, CScope, to provide the database needed to move around a project by tag name.
In addition, CEDET will parse your headers and nearby files in idle time, so eventually you will have a complete database of all your local files in about 10 minutes after using the tools the first time. You can speed it up by opening a file, and calling
M-x semantic-debug-idle-work-function
which will go off and do that stuff without waiting.
In the end, I've found that the best solution is to brute-force the parsing of the files manually using a bit of elisp. The best answer I've found to this is here.
I am not sure if anybody has experienced this.
I am working with a very large file having 7000 lines of code.
I made a lot of changes and when i compared the file with the repository version, it showed me incorrect differences.
I guess the diff algorithm buffers only limited number of lines ahead/behind for searching the current line, and on failing to find that, it simply shows diff with current line in new file.
One such snapshot > http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/ENwZ4gqXxiCF3SWqVnVAqA?feat=directlink
If anybody knows any workaround, please let me know.
Thanks
Easy workaround - use another diff tool. I'm serious. I wouldn't waste time splitting up my files, or wondering how to get it to work with Eclipse's diff tool if there's some known issue with really big files.
I recommend Beyond Compare 3. I say this having used many different diff tools. It's not free, but it's worth it. In the rare chance that it gets confused, it allows you to with a couple of clicks realign any areas that it got confused on. I have used it with some pretty large files, and it rocks.
If you're concerned about Eclipse integration, there's even a plugin, BeyondCVS, that allows you to launch your Beyond Compare diffing from the Eclipse right click 'Compare' menus. Its name is kind of misleading though, as it doesn't appear to be related to CVS.
If you need something free, try one of these diff tools instead:
WinMerge
SourceGear DiffMerge
What version of eclipse are you using? And what edition? (Java? CDT? ...)
Depending on those data, it could make a difference, since files with several thousand lines are known to be a problem for the diff algorithm.
See this thread for illustration.
And do check, as mentioned in the same thread, your error log to check if any particular message could help you to pinpoint the cause of the failed diff.