Question

I am looking for a command M-x find in Emacs, which behave exactly like M-x grep (allows to modify the command, prints the output nicely including links to the found files, …) and which executes find . -iname '*|*' (with the cursor placed at the vertical bar — for inserting a search pattern — if not too complicated to implement). Has anyone implemented this before? [I am aware of M-x find-grep]

Answer 1

Let’s start with M-xfind-dired that does almost what you want: it reads directory from minibuffer, defaulting to current directory, and then reads other find arguments. The result is opened in dired mode, and I think it’s as nicely as it can get (if you think that dired is too verbose, check out dired-details and maybe dired-details+ packages at MELPA).

Now let’s make it start with -iname ** with a cursor between the stars when it’s asking for options. Looking at find-dired source, we can see that it uses the value of find-args as an initial input argument to read-string. This argument is obsolete and deprecated but awfully useful. One of its features (as we read in read-from-minibuffer description) is providing a default point position when a cons of a string and an integer is given.

(defun marius/find-dired ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((find-args '("-iname '**'" . 10)))
    (call-interactively 'find-dired)))

We added single quotes around stars in '**' because the arguments are subject to shell expansion.

Instead of reading our own arguments from the minibuffer, we just
rebind find-args and delegate all the rest to find-dired. Normally
find-dired remembers last arguments you enter in find-args so they
become the new default. Rebinding it with let ensures that this
modification from our call to find-dired will be thrown away, so
regular find-dired will use the arguments given to the latest
regular find-dired. It probably doesn’t matter if you don’t use regular find-dired. If you want find arguments given to our wrapper to be used by regular find-dired, use the following definition instead:

(defun marius/find-dired ()
  (interactive)
  (setq find-args '("-iname '**'" . 10))
  (call-interactively 'find-dired))