Subject: bug#895: slow processing of process output

From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:57:35 +0200

I wonder whether (in the long term) it would make more sense to have the
`M-x grep' command be less...  shell-script-ey.

That is, if we instead prompted for the regexp we wanted to match
explicitly, then we could highlight it ourselves instead of relying on
grep to do it.

However, `M-x grep' as it is is pretty neat, because you can fiddle with
all the options and do

grep ... | grep -v | etc

So providing something that is as flexible as `M-x grep' is today, but
allow Emacs greater control of the output sounds difficult.

Ok, here's one other possibility off the top of my head: What about if
Emacs parsed the command line?  :-)

That is, if you're typing

grep -nH -e foo.*bar *.el

then the grep syntax isn't that impossible to parse.  I mean, finding
the regexp, and highlighting the matching bits.

It isn't difficult to imagine more complex command lines that Emacs
wouldn't be able to parse, though.  And you'd lose highlighting of the
matches there...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/