[herokusaki]

> find that automatically filters out files that are not source code

Not just that but an extensible set of file type filters that are simple to invoke is what I had in mind. E.g., the tool would let you perform searches like

  find++ --Python  projects/archive/200?

or

  find++ --video trailer

where in the latter case the hypothetical find++ would refer to my config to get a list of video file extensions and then print a list of all files in the current directory and its subdirectories with the word "trailer" in their name. For better effect it would ship with useful filters like "--video" by default.

[e12e]

Right. It's not entirely straight forward to link up the mime database (via eg: file) and generating filters for use by find. Basing filters off of filenames isn't a very good idea -- and actually a little regressive in my opinion -- after all project/bin/foo (executable) might be a python or perl or whatever script -- not just a binary file.

But first getting all files via find, then testing with file, and finally matching against mime-type doesn't sound like something that's going to be as fast as possible...

I tried to see if maybe gvfs (gio - gnome io) could help, but couldn't really find anything directly applicable (although there is a set of gvfs command line tools, like gvfs-ls, gvfs-info, gvfs-mime).

[petdance]

> after all project/bin/foo (executable) might be a python or perl or whatever script -- not just a binary file.

That's one of the big features of ack that the find/grep combo can't replicate is checking the shebang of the file to detect type. In ack's case, Perl and shell programs are detected both by extension:

  --type-add=perl:ext:pl,pm,pod,t,psgi
  --type-add=shell:ext:sh,bash,csh,tcsh,ksh,zsh,fish

And by checking the shebang:

  --type-add=perl:firstlinematch:/^#!.*\bperl/
  --type-add=shell:firstlinematch:/^#!.*\b(?:ba|t?c|k|z|fi)?sh\b/

Run `ack --dump` to see a list of all the definitions.

[herokusaki]

You may be right about the extensions.

Thanks for suggesting gvfs. I'll investigate it and similar databases from other packages (I know at least KDE has its own).