I’ve been giving emacs a try after having probably the most civilized “emacs vs. vim” discussion I’ve ever seen or been a part of. The discussion took place just over two weeks ago at the PDX Hackathon with Brian Rice (emacs) and Ben Hengst (vim).

I’ve discovered a few things in working with emacs that I really wish vim had, and I’ve really missed a few things that I had from vim. I’m trying to make sure that I give emacs a fair shot, so I’m trying out a few elisp scripts, and tweaking things as I go along, since my vim setup is hardly “stock”.

This tweaking has led me to try out ack.el and full-ack.el. I liked ack.el’s usage of emacs’s compilation mode, but hated having to construct the ack command line myself (including the directory to ack). full-ack.el handled constructing the ack command line much better, however I hated how it put the ack output into a temporary buffer of its own, instead of using emacs’s compilation support. These two scripts seemed ripe for merging into one super-script with the best features from each.

Thus was born ack-and-a-half.el!

Just download the .el, and throw something like the following into your ~/.emacs.d/init.el

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(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/ack-and-a-half")
(autoload 'ack-and-a-half-same "ack-and-a-half" nil t)
(autoload 'ack-and-a-half "ack-and-a-half" nil t)
(autoload 'ack-and-a-half-find-file-samee "ack-and-a-half" nil t)
(autoload 'ack-and-a-half-find-file "ack-and-a-half" nil t)
;; Create shorter aliases
(defalias 'ack 'ack-and-a-half)
(defalias 'ack-same 'ack-and-a-half-same)
(defalias 'ack-find-file 'ack-and-a-half-find-file)
(defalias 'ack-find-file-same 'ack-and-a-half-find-file-same)