Using Emacs 48 Silversearcher

A couple of days ago I wrote about on my lab grading workflow. In the post I mentioned that I used Emacs to easily navigate between student folders and files so I can actually look at their work in addition to their programs output and test results.

The key is a combination of dired and ag, Emacs's interface to the Silver Searcher which is something like a recursive code grep on steroids. I also briefly try to show wgrep in the video which allows you to edit Emacs grep buffers, effectively allowing you to make changes across a set of files all at once. It ended up not working with silversearcher - if anyone out there knows why, please chime in.

Enjoy: