[agateau]

I love that ripgrep honors .gitignore, but the fact that it skips hidden files is annoying because of questionable decisions from tool makers who insist their configuration files should be hidden files. It is especially infuriating when working with GitHub and GitLab configuration directories. On the other hand I never want ripgrep to enter the .git directory.

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 '!'...)

[burntsushi]

Yeah that alias is a good one, here are some other avenues:

* 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.

[agateau]

I use ripgrep everywhere, not only in my own repositories, so the first approach won't work for me. The second one, on the other hand, sounds like a really good idea, going to look into it, thanks.

And of course, thanks for this wonderful tool!

[tmtvl]

If I'm understanding this correctly, ripgrep parses multiple possible configuration files and is still one of the fastest tools I've ever used? That is amazing.

[burntsushi]

TL;DR - yes. :-)

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.