Re: [RFC/PATCH] Fix path prefixing in grep_object

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Phil Hord [off-list ref] wrote:

If so, then I would like to point out to you the convenience I
accidentally encountered using this tool.  Perhaps you didn't realize
how helpful it was when you chose to use a colon there.

My itch comes from a case where I am looking for references in some
other branch and I want to narrow my search.

  $ git grep object origin/master
  origin/master:.gitignore:/git-count-objects
  origin/master:.gitignore:/git-fsck-objects
  origin/master:.gitignore:/git-hash-object
  <8600 lines more deleted>

I find hits in the region that interests me and then I try to zoom in
there.  Conveniently, the path I want to search is right there on my
screen.  So I copy the part of the object reference I want to limit my
search to, and I try again:

   $ git grep object origin/master:builtin/

Now, I find the file that has the code I wanted.  But I want to do
something fancier to it than grep, so this time I copy-and-paste the
filename into my command line after typing 'git show':

   $ git show origin/master:builtin/pack-objects.c | vim -

But this doesn't work if the delimiter used was a colon.

   $ git show origin/master:builtin:pack-objects.c | vim -

I have to edit my copy-and-pasted text, which means I have think about
it a bit, and it interrupts all the other things I was thinking about
already.  Eventually I might learn to do this edit automatically,
except it is not needed most of the time.  It is only needed when I
provide a tree-path instead of a "branch <space> path". In the latter
case, the full path is spelled out for me correctly.  And in all other
cases the filenames provided by git-grep are valid filenames or object
names.