Re: What does Emacs on w32 know that grep can't figure out?

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: Lennart Borgman <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2010 11:28:49 +0200
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
>>
>> > What's wrong with "M-x occur" and/or "M-x multi-occur"?
>>
>> They does not do what grep does.
>
> Like what?


Look at all the files in a directory.


>> And as I said opening the files in a buffer will be bad because of 
>> performance.
>
> What do you think Grep does?  Doesn't it open the files and read them?


I think we have discussed before that putting the files in a buffer
would be a performance problem in a case like this, especially if the
file is big.

So I think something inside Emacs that could determine file coding but
did not put the file in a buffer is what I would want for this. Is
that hard to implement from what we have?


>> However using the internal regexp engine for searching the files would
>> be useful, but I have no idea how complicated it is to implement
>> something like that.
>
> Emacs does similar things in quite a few places already.


You mean similar to what I suggested above? (Or do you mean something
quite different, something on the elisp level?)