Searching code for "TODO" comments with git grep

07 Oct 2012 by Yuri Prezument

My code, like most code, tends to contain TODO/FIXME comments for things that I don't want to bother with at the time of writing them. Sometimes, these tend to pile up. A quick method of finding them is git grep:

$ git grep TODO

Today I was looking for "TODO" annotations in an old project and completely missed a couple of FIXMEs due to being too lazy to grep for them. This would have caught them:

$ git grep -e TODO -e FIXME

But that's too much typing. So why not make an alias for it?

[alias]
    todo = grep -n -e TODO -e FIXME -e XXX -e OPTIMIZE

And then...

$ git todo
celeryconfig.py:7:        # TODO: find best schedule to avoid query limits
models.py:38:    # FIXME: remove this method soon

Ok, that was fun. Back to work...

Notes:

  • On a general note - don't let TODOs and FIXMEs pile up in the first place. If it's easy to fix - fix it. If not, document it or open an issue.

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