Searching in Clojure and ClojureScript files with Ack

"Ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers". I knew the existence of Ack since a few years but I never gave it try. Now that I did, I'm positively surprised: it's easy to use and fast.

I was always fighting in Emacs between grep (what is the syntax?), igrep-find (why did it suddenly stopped to prompt for directories?), tags-search (ooops some of my files are not tagged) and rgrep (oh it did exist?). I installed ack-and-a-half for Emacs and its great. Ack-and-half tries to find automatically the root directory of your project but you can set ack-and-a-half-prompt-for-directory to true with (setq ack-and-a-half-prompt-for-directory t) for it to ask which directory to search in.

The Ack version on the website provides support for Clojure files. For ClojureScript files, you need to add the following lines to your ~/.ackrc file:

--type-add
clojure=.cljs

Et voilà, enjoy!

An Emacs minor mode for the ClojureScript compilation

When programming with ClojureScript, one has to lunch "lein cljsbuild auto" to automatically compiles its ClojureScript sources. It is convenient but a problem remains: the output of the compilation process must be manually read to see if any errors or warnings occur.

To solve this problem I programmed a simple minor mode for Emacs. If you start the cljsbuild command in a terminal buffer, it will watch the ouput and popup the window if an error or a warning occurs. It can also automatically hide the process when the compilation succeed, so that you are able to concentrate on what matters, the code.

It's available on Marmalade or Github.

Feedback and patches are welcomed!