ag doesn't search (ag 0.18.1)

[jwalt]

When running ag, the ag subprocess doesn't actually start searching. It seems to wait for input from stdin.

A small change in line 138 fixes this, just append "." to the end of the command:

(compilation-start
 (mapconcat 'shell-quote-argument
            (append '("ag") arguments (list string) '("."))
            " ")

[Wilfred]

That's really weird. Could you paste the command that is run in the buffer? For example, if I do a search, I get the following:

-*- mode: ag; default-directory: "~/personal/ag.el/" -*-
Ag started at Thu Nov 21 11:46:55

ag --color --color-match 30\;43 --literal --smart-case --nogroup --column -- while
ag.el:256:12:          (while (re-search-forward "\033\\[30;43m\\(.*?\\)\033\\[[0-9]*m" end 1)
ag.el:262:12:          (while (re-search-forward "\033\\[[0-9;]*[mK]" end 1)

Ag finished at Thu Nov 21 11:46:55

(run with ag.el version 0.32, ag version 0.18.1)

So the command is ag --color --color-match 30\;43 --literal --smart-case --nogroup --column -- while, which also works when I run it manually from the shell.

Also, does this occur if you start from a clean configuration (using emacs -Q)? Have you customised ag-arguments?

[arongp]

I also have this issue on my Windows 7 x64 machine. The ag process is running background but no results are shown in Emacs.

I can get search results by appending "." to the end of ag command, but the results are not highlighted and next-error command is not working in compilation buffer probably because of regexp mismatch.

I'm using ag.el 0.33 and ag version 0.18.1 on Windows 7 x64, and ag-arguments are not customized.

[Wilfred]

Aha, Windows. Sounds like it might be an upstream bug, but I'm happy to append . to workaround in the meantime. Does the same behaviour happen if you run ag directly from a shell without the .?

Also, could you say what values you have for shell-file-name and shell-command-switch please?

Highlighting not working (assuming you've set ag-highlight-search) is odd, as is next-error not working. Hmm.

[arongp]

ag on Windows cmd.exe works fine without having . at the end. It's only lisp code has this issue.
In my case, the shell-file-name is d:/emacs/bin/cmdproxy.exe and the shell-command-switch is -c.

And what I mean by highlighting is the underlines of the matched file names in compilation buffer. Sorry for this incorrect statement.

Here are some output from ag.el for search string: text

-*- mode: ag; default-directory: "~/.emacs.d/elpa/ag-20131103.1957/" -*-
Ag started at Tue Nov 26 09:53:53

"ag" "--nocolor" "--literal" "--smart-case" "--nogroup" "--column" "--" "text" "."
ag.el:24:   (:else (format "*ag text:%s dir:%s*" search-string directory))))

Ag finished at Tue Nov 26 09:53:53

You can see that we lost the line number, and thus this doesn't match the compilation mode pattern in ag.el ^\\([^:\n]+?\\):\\([1-9][0-9]*\\):\\([1-9][0-9]*\\):. I guess this is why next-error fails. And running ag directly from cmd.exe correctly prints the line number.

Also FYI,
I get Windows version of ag.exe from https://github.com/kjk/the_silver_searcher/, and of course, ag.el works fine on my Mac OS X 10.9.

[Wilfred]

OK, I've not yet had an opportunity to examine this thoroughly, but I've made the change you suggested. Thanks for the pointer to the kjk repo, I'll give it a try.

[ryane]

Hi, fyi, I am seeing the same issue as @arongp.

Windows 8.1 x64
ag.el: 0.34
ag version: 0.15pre
shell-file-name: "C:/emacs/emacs-24.3/bin/cmdproxy.exe"
shell-command-switch: -c

[swinkels]

After some investigation I found out that if you pass option --line-number to ag, the line number is displayed. This options prints the line number even if the input is a stream. I do not really know how ag and Emacs interact, but adding that option did the trick for me.

This is my updated version of ag-arguments:

g-arguments is a variable defined in `ag.el'.
Its value is ("--smart-case" "--nogroup" "--line-numbers" "--column" "--")

Original value was 
("--smart-case" "--nogroup" "--column" "--")

Rhetorical question: maybe this is related to leonid-shevtsov/SearchInProject_SublimeText#1 (comment) ?

[Wilfred]

Thanks for the links, this certainly looks relevant to #52. However, this particular issue is about no results at all in the results buffer, as I understand it.

[webframp]

Just confirming this change worked for me, here's what I did:

(defconst *is-windows* (eq system-type 'windows-nt))

(when *is-windows*
  (setq-default ag-arguments (cons "--line-numbers" ag-arguments)))

[Wilfred]

OK, I believe the issues raised in this ticket are now fixed.

@jwalt found that ag seems to require passing the current directory (i.e. appending . to the search command). We now do this.

@arongp was missing line numbers. This was fixed in #52.

Please let me know if ag.el isn't working as expected for you.