> By the way, it will use .gitignore files in a git directory.

If I'm in a repo, I'm using `git grep`.

That makes `rg` a mostly redundant tool for me since it's optimized for searching source code. I can't really use it as a general purpose replacement for grep since if it doesn't find anything I'm left wondering whether what I'm searching is not really there or whether `rg` just didn't bother to check. Even with `--no-ignore --all`, I'm still not sure whether it searches everything. It's one of those tools that I find is too clever for my own good.

So when `git grep` doesn't cover my use case, my fall back is `find | grep` which contains no magic and I know exactly what it's searching.

In particular, ’rg ‐uuu’ should search the same exact content as ’grep ‐r’.

Thank you. This inspired me to read the ripgrep man page. I think I must have been confusing ripgrep's behavior with the earlier ack (or maybe ag) tool which only searched known extensions by default. I see now that ripgrep only does that if explicitly given a --type option.

Whoa, I didn't even know about `git grep`. Sure enough, `man git-grep` has a bunch of relevant info! Thanks for sharing this.

I feel like there are a billion features in git (like this) that I don't know about.

It’s handy if you want to search more than one repo at once. I believe you can do ‘rg -uuu’ as a shorthand to disable all ignores

This. Also you can do stuff like «rg —python myvariable» to search python files only. Neat for multi-language directory trees. (Works with many other languages.)

Do you know about “git grep”? It’s like grep but only greps files tracked by git. Very useful.

Why use a git-specific tool when a generic one (rg) works just as well, even from a parent directory?

I often use rg to search code across repositories so it's useful to have that regardless of grep and git

Often a directory contains a mix of source files (in git) and output files (usually in .gitignore). But maybe rg automatically handles this?

It does

I didn't, seems worth giving a look.

> It has sane defaults but you can tweak this with a .rgignore file, which is like .gitignore but for rg. By the way, it will use .gitignore files in a git directory.

Fwiw there’s also a « .ignore » semi-standard which works with several tools, and not just greps e.g. fd also respects it by default.