Emacs 24 has a great feature built-in called occur, it lets you
search for strings in the current buffer. I've applied a
slight tweak to it
so that it defaults to searching for the thing under the cursor and
bound it to Alt+s o.
Here, I've opened /etc/passwd and I want to view all users that use
the shell /usr/sbin/nologin, so I have navigated to that string and
hit the shortcut for occur:
It suggests searching for the thing at point, to which I answer yes, please and hit Enter:
In this search result, I want to drill further down through the
results, displaying only the /usr/sbin/nologin entries that have
something to do with mail. so I do the same thing again, put my
cursor somewhere it says mail and run occur again:
The lines in the occur search result buffers are of course clickable
and will take you to the line of interest in the /etc/passwd file
itself.
Cool, eh?
Wait a minute! That's not facted search ...
Well, it's not really facted search, but filtered search, but still, you get my point: continuously narrow down your search results 😃
