I adore ripgrep. It's fast, it's convenient, and I've never wanted a feature and found it missing.

But no software is perfect, and today ripgrep was the program causing problems.

echo '!/.github/' >> .rgignore

By default, ripgrep doesn't search everything. It checks your .gitignore for example, which is wonderful when you don't want to be searching all of node_modules. It also ignores hidden files and that's what bit me today.

See GitHub Actions are stored under .github/workflows/, so when I removed a particular file and rg'd through my whole codebase making sure it wasn't used anywhere I missed that it was used in some GitHub Actions.

Easily fixed, but how to make sure I don't get bit again?

We can search hidden files (but ignore .git/) with

rg --hidden --glob=!.git/*

but that's a bit of a pain to type for a tool I use many times daily.

It turns out ripgrep does have a configuration file that you can activate by setting an environment variable (RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH).

After a bit of fussing with fish to get the variable set properly, I ended up with this in my shell config:

set -gx RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH $HOME/.config/ripgreprc

and this in my ripgreprc:

--hidden
--glob=!.git/*

And now I'm on to bigger and better (or at least different) problems.