Automatic paging with ack and rak (git style)

After reading Git-Style Automatic Paging in Ruby, I wanted to try it out on my new favorite command line toy: ack.

Getting ack to work is as simple as adding the following to your ~/.ackrc.

# Always color, even if piping to a filter
--color

# Use "less -r" as my pager
--pager=LESS=FSRX less -r

rak is very similar to ack, only written in Ruby. To see some examples of using rak, check out Getting to Know a Gem: Rak.

rak doesn't support paging by default, so I'd have to do a really quick hack to get things to work. Luckily, rak is hosted on git at git://git.donttreadonme.co.uk/rak, so I forked it over at GitHub and copied the run_pager method from the cheat project.

The results can be seen over at http://github.com/PotatoSalad/rak. I wanted to try out github's new gem building feature, so I included a gemspec file in my changes. If you've got rubygems installed, just run...

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com/ (you only need to run this once)
sudo gem install PotatoSalad-rak

(see gems.github.com for more information)

Finally, if you'd like to see my changes/make your own, grab a copy of my repository with git clone git://github.com/PotatoSalad/rak.git