Code for Concinnity

If you use Ack, you may be annoyed by the fact that it only reads $HOME/.ackrc but not the project-local ./.ackrc.

It turns out it is quite easy to do it yourself by creating a simple shell script wrapper and then aliasing the ack command:

That’s it! Now I can create a .ackrc file at project root like this:

Now using this technique, one can easily create a wrapper than reads both $HOME/.greprc and ./.greprc and you get Ack’s functionality in grep! Now you wonder if we really need Ack at all

It has always looked not-so-cool to have to type “Sharing” at the start menu or worse yet, navigate through the Control Panel just to start it. Today I finally dug out how to do it from TechNet:

Looks like Microsoft decided to go down the verbose path. Maybe I’ll just stick with the old ways :p