Ripgrep is a tool used for searching for files through your computer’s terminal. It’s based off another tool called grep. The difference between the two is that ripgrep will read your .gitignore file thereby being a lot faster

Here is where you can read up on .gitignore if you want more info.

Installation

Mac

brew install ripgrep

Unix/Linux

yum-config-manager --add-repo=https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/carlwgeorge/ripgrep/repo/epel-7/carlwgeorge-ripgrep-epel-7.repo

yum install ripgrep

Windows

choco install ripgrep

Confirm that you have it by typing in this:

rg --version

Its speed is quite fast, it defaults to recursively searching your directories where it’ll use your .gitignore,.ignore, or finally your .rgignore file. It ignores hidden and binary files by default. You can use it to search specific files like this:

rg nextInt -tgo

This is saying that we want to search for the text nextInt only where the files have the .go extension. It shows us that we have results on lines 13,15,16, and 17.

The thing that I love about Ripgrep compared to other search tools is that you can supply custom parameters to search through files that ripgrep might not know how to search.

Searching custom files

The real beauty of ripgrep is that you can customize it. Some tools like the Silver Searcher (ag) are also fast, but if there’s a filetype that it doesn’t recognize, I can’t filter by it¹.

Here’s a small example of using Java. I am wanting to search for the text apple in the code, but in this case, I don’t care about property files.

My response when many files show up that didn’t get filtered.

via GIPHY

Yet, I can fix this by either typing this code below in the terminal for a one time case, or by creating an alias so I can always exclude property files when I’m searching Java. Note, this is just an example, you should be careful what you filter.

Here is the alias.

Unix/Linux/Mac

alias rg="rg --type-add 'java:*.java' -g '!*.properties'"

Windows

I have not tested this. Your milage may vary.

set "rg=rg --type-add 'java:*.java' -g '!*.properties'"

It’s now searching Java, but excluding property files.

You can click here if you want more info on what ripgrep is capable of.