The Joy of .agignore

For searching files, I normally use The Silver Searcher (or Ag as it is commonly shortened), and I’ve set up CtrlP in Vim to use Ag as well for fuzzy file search. CtrlP is, however, terribly slow when working with larger projects if you do not scope your search properly. For quite some time, I’ve been trying to solve this issue, but I recently stumbled upon the solution to my agonizing problem.

First of all, since CtrlP uses Ag, it uses the .agignore file for ignoring specific folders, file types, etc. I needed to exclude especially the vendor/bundle folder from the results as it currently contains over 150.000 files that I am not interested in at all. Despite the fact that I configured .agignore accordingly, CtrlP still did not scope my search as expected.

After traversing several pages of search results on Google, I finally found the solution mentioned in an issue on GitHub. Apparently, I had to update Ag to version 0.22 as earlier versions of Ag does not respect the .agignore file, and it now works like a charm.