There are a lot of terminal commands floating around that will list the TODO comments in your source code, but I’ve always found their output format lacking. Last week I decided to come up with something better. It’s language agnostic and it organizes everything into vertical columns to make reading easier:

shell ack -i \ -o \ --group \ --color \ --sort-files "\b(TODO|FIX(ME)?|OPTIMIZE|BUG)(\(\w+\))?: (.*)" \ --ignore-dir={.git,node_modules,vendor,Pods} \ | perl -pe "s/:/\t/" \ | perl -pe "s/\t(\w+)(\(\w+\))?:(.*)/\t\$1:\$3 \$2/"

Here’s a breakdown of the options we’re using, and a few others you might find useful:

Option	Description
--color	Highlight the matching text
-follow	Follow symbolic links
--group	Group matches by filename
-i	Ignore the case of matches
-n	Don’t search within subdirectories
-o	Display only the matched text1
--sort-files	Sort the outputted files in alphabetical order
--ignore-dir	A list of directories that should be ignored

Updates

• Fixed a bug where words such as “suffix” were captured, and added examples for ignoring directories. — 17 April 2016
• Added support files whose names begin with a period. — 30 July 2016
• Moved Go-style attribution to the end of the comment. This should make the list easier to scan. For example, “XYZ(who): Comment text” is now displayed as “XYZ: Comment text (who)”. — 25 May 2014
• Added support for “BUG” and Go-style attributed comments such as “BUG(who)”. — 29 April 2014