technology

emacs, windows, and ack

I just had to migrate to a new work computer and it took a bit of remembering to get ack working from emacs. For next time, here are the instructions for getting it to work.

  1. Install Perl
  2. Add the perl bin and site bin to the Windows Path
  3. Download the single file version of ack to the site bin (note the .pl extension): 
    1
    curl http://beyondgrep.com/ack-2.12-single-file > c:\Strawberry\perl\site\bin\ack.pl
  4. Associate the .pl Extension with perl by running the following lines as an administrator: 
    1
    2
    assoc .pl=PerlScript
    ftype PerlScript=C:\Strawberry\bin\perl.exe "%1" %*
    This assumes that you’ve installed Strawberry Perl to the default installation directory.
  5. Define an ack function for use in emacs (see Stack Overflow on ack in Emacs on Windows): 
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
    10
    11
    12
    13
    14
    15
    16
    17
    18
    (defvar ack-command "ack --nogroup --nocolor ")
    (defvar ack-history nil)
    (defvar ack-host-defaults-alist nil)
    (defun ack ()
      "Like grep, but using ack-command as the default"
      (interactive)
      ; Make sure grep has been initialized
      (if (>= emacs-major-version 22)
          (require 'grep)
        (require 'compile))
      ; Close STDIN to keep ack from going into filter mode
      (let ((null-device (format "< %s" null-device))
            (grep-command ack-command)
            (grep-history ack-history)
            (grep-host-defaults-alist ack-host-defaults-alist))
        (call-interactively 'grep)
        (setq ack-history             grep-history
              ack-host-defaults-alist grep-host-defaults-alist))    )