rg-cheat.md

ripgrep Cheat Sheet

Default Behaviors

By default ripgrep will:

• Honor your .gitignore settings.
• Checks for additional ignore directives in .ignore.
• Does not process hidden files or directories.
• Does not follow symlinks.

Useful command line arguments

These are the arguments I'm most likely to use.

• -h for brief help.
• --help for complete help.
• -i for case insensitive searches.
• -S for smart case searches as in editors.
• -F to search for a string instead of a regular expression.
• -w to treat the search string as if it was bracketed by \b.
• -g for file globs to accept or reject(!).
• -. to include hidden files in the search.
• -L to follow symbolic links.
• -M=### clips large lines to show ### columns.
• -max-columns-preview with above shows a preview.
• -C show the context around the match.
• -c prints the names of files with matches and the number of matches in each file.
• --type {type} to search only files of a type.
• --type-not {type} to exclude files of a type.
• --type-list to see type to extension mappings.
• --stats for analysis of your search.

Search Strings

By default the search string is evaluated as a regular expression. Normal shell conventions for quoting to avoid globbing work as expected.

$ ls
README.md
README.txt
readme.md

$ ls >bogus.txt

$ # search is a file glob:
$ rg readme.*
bogus.txt: readme.md

$ # search is a regular expression with globbing inhibited:
$ rg 'README.*'
bogus.txt: README.md
bogus.txt: README.txt

$ # search for a literal splat in golang files:
$ rg -F '*' --type go
...

Configuration

A configuration at ~/.ripgreprc of the one argument or value per line format can override defaults if you do not like the builtin defaults.

This will make searches case insensitive and adds a new filetype.

File .ignore:

-i
--type-add
'purebasic:*.{pb,pbi}'