Re: "Non-standard UI",

[Juri Linkov]

>> rgrep/vc-git-grep provides good UI.
>
> No, it doesn't. It's the bare-bone-est UI possible, and it wastes a lot of
> horizontal space. It doesn't provide a means to search-and-replace. And
> it's not fit for programmatic construction, so Xref can't use it.

If you don't like the grep output format, you can replace 'grep-filter'
with your own process filter that would transform it to any other format.

> So we can't standardize on it, no matter how much you are used to it.

> It is one of "quality of life" things I have spent quite some effort on
> improving, and to be frank I don't appreciate you handwaving all that 
> away by simply saying "non-standard".

We already had 2 different formats: grep and occur, and now came a new
3rd format: xref.  I think any attempt to standardize on the output format
should be welcome.  Of course, a general UI should be customizable enough
to provide look and feel of any of the current formats.

> None of the "standard" UIs you mentioned provide the functionality we
> need. Grep is async, but cumbersome and has no provision of doing 
> anything with the matches: Wgrep is not in Emacs, not even in GNU ELPA, and
> there's no quick "replace matching string with xxx" feature in it
> anyway. Occur only works with buffers, it's not async either, and the 
> overhead of visiting who knows how many buffers is basically unlimited
> (Grep is way faster at finding matches than Emacs at visiting files). 
> It's objectively *worse* for the purpose at hand, which will be especially
> evident in bigger projects.

Why not take the best parts from these contenders?
Take async part of finding matches from grep and
transform its output to any format you like.