Emacs: How to exclude files when searching in a project

Posted on in emacs, tools

I use SPC / a lot to find stuff inside a project. Since starting on Ruby project, a lot of my search results, specifically the first ones are inside the spec file (which is test case in Ruby)

I may want those instances as well, but more often than not, I prefer the search results in the source code before test cases.

The project is huge, and I have to scroll a lot before I see non-spec code, which becomes tiresome.

While I was looking for solution, I came across two things :

  1. deadgrep (I think it is a play on ripgrep)
  2. .ignore file

.ignore file is similar to .gitignore which is specific to git

While search tools like ag and ripgrep honor .gitignore in my case, test files are part of the git repo (as they should be) and are thus not in .gitignore

This is where .ignore came in handy.

I added *_spec.rb in a .ignore file created in the root of the project.

Voila!

Now search results are much better 😌