A file searcher akin to grep, ack, or ag (aka the silver searcher) it's programmed in Rust so it is decently fast with good support for UTF-8.
Unfortunately it defaults to parsing a git tree's gitignore file and skipping over files listed in it.
Unfortunately it defaults to parsing a git tree's gitignore file and skipping over files listed in it.
The idea behind it is that it acts a heuristic for reducing false positives from your search results. For example, ripgrep replaced several little grep wrapper scripts I had in ~/bin.
And fortunately the default behavior is easy to disable. `rg -uuu foo` will search the same stuff as `grep -r foo ./`, but will do it faster.
I recently came up with this alias to make ripgrep do what I want: do not skip hidden files, except for the .git directory:
alias rg="rg --hidden --glob '!.git/'"
(Note: if you try entering this alias interactively, you may have to escape the '!'...)
* The repo can add a `.ignore` or a `.rgignore` whitelisting things like `.github`. ripgrep will pick up that whitelist automatically and search `.github` even though it's hidden. But this relies on the repo adding ripgrep-specific config files, which is maybe not so realistic. (Or not universal enough to rely upon.) But it could work fine for repos under your control.
* Add '!.github/' to, e.g., `~/.config/ripgrep/ignore`, and then add `alias rg="--ignore-file ~/.config/ripgrep/ignore"`. That will become a global ignore file (with low precedent) that will whitelist `.github` everywhere.
And of course, thanks for this wonderful tool!
There is a ripgrep "config file" (not mentioned in my previous comment), but there is only one and you have to set it via RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH.
The things mentioned above are "ignore files," which are a sort of configuration for whitelisting and blacklisting files to search in a directory tree. And yes, you can splat them down into any directory, and if ripgrep enters that directory, it will read it and respect it. (Unless you tell it not to.)
If there are a lot of files with a lot of patterns, indeed, that can wind up taking a chunk of time not only building the matchers for each config file, but for actually matching them against every path. Sometimes it takes longer than not ignoring files at all! But if your ignore files are permitting ripgrep to skip GBs of data that GNU grep wouldn't otherwise skip, well, that's going to be a huge win no matter how you slice it.
ripgrep does use multi-threading as well, and it makes sure every ignore file is parsed and built only once. All other threads can then share the one single matcher.
That's a feature.
Like, it's the entire point of ripgrep. It's designed to search through the things a developer actually cares about searching through.
If you actually want to search everything, just use grep.
Is that true? How could anybody think that this non-orthogonal monstrosity would make any sense?
I will agree that in a sane project setup you don't need to search through all files including build artifacts ignored by git.
Orthogality is a means to an end, not an end itself.