Subject: Add ability to truncate long grep matches
From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
To: bug-emacs <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2014 12:52:46 +0100
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

In some files (e.g. in text files using newline as a paragraph delimiter)
one can get matches in very long lines that can occupy several screenfuls.
These are not always straightforward to avoid. There's no way to tell (GNU)
grep to truncate its output; perhaps Emacs could help here, by being able
to specify a maximum length of match to show? For bonus points, show part
of the line that matches, with ellipses, rather than just truncating the
line; but even without that it would be useful, provided that the
truncation is clearly marked: the annoyance and slowness of navigating
*grep* buffers full of enormous matches which are almost always not what
one is looking for would be great!

(I just managed to work around one source, minified Javascript mixed in
with non-minified files, by omitting *.min.js in the list of files grep
should ignore, but this is not always easy either: sometimes one might only
have the minified form to hand, and might want to grep it e.g. while
debugging.)

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org