https://sepi.me/emacs-ripgrep-workaround/

 
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my pain points with Emacs code search and how I fixed them

on 2023-10-22

I love Emacs, but one of the things I miss from Visual Studio Code is
a good code search feature. The built-in grep command is powerful,
but it's not very easy to use, and the search results can be
difficult to navigate, especially in large codebases.

There are many third-party packages that try to solve this problem,
but most of them have the same issues: they're either difficult to
use or the search results are hard to navigate.

However, there is one package called rg.el that does a great job of
fixing both of these problems.

rg.el is a wrapper for the ripgrep command-line tool, which is a very
fast and powerful code search tool. ripgrep understands file types
and comes with a good set of defaults, so you don't need to worry
about writing complex regex patterns.

rg.el also has a fantastic transient-based UI system that makes it
easy to manipulate the search results. For example, you can easily
exclude (or include) certain patterns from the results by adding a
--glob flag to your search.

For example, if you're working on a Go project and you want to search
for the function encodeBase64, you can use the following command to
exclude all test files from the results:

rg-project encodeBase64 --glob='!*test.go'

This is great, but there's one issue. rg.el only allows you to
specify one --glob flag at a time. This is fine in some cases, but
there are times when you need to exclude multiple patterns.

Fortunately, there's a workaround. You can set the global variable
rg-command-line-flags to an array of strings of custom flags, and all
of those strings will be passed to ripgrep command.

if you're unsure how to do this, here's a step-by-step example:

 1. Press M-: to activate the eval prompt in the minibuffer.
 2. Set the variable to your desired values, for instance: (setq
    rg-command-line-flags '("-g '!*_test.go'" "-g '!*foo.go'")).

You only need to do this once, and all subsequent searches will be
affected by it. To disable this behavior, simply set
rg-command-line-flags to nil.

I wish rg.el supported multiple filters in its UI, but this
workaround is fine for me for the time being.

Conclusion

rg.el is a great code search package for Emacs. It's easy to use and
the search results are easy to navigate. If you're looking for a good
code search solution for Emacs, I highly recommend rg.el.

  * emacs
  * search
  * code
  * ripgrep

   
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