"Mo"
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ripgrep and the rgignore file

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I’m a huge fan of ripgrep. And that’s not an exaggeration. It’s literally my number one used tool on the terminal.

Terminal window
$ history --search | string trim | string replace -r ' .*' '' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10
2913 rg
1005 git
 369 cd
 322 ls
 287 cat
 285 rm
 226 fd
 188 brew
 168 j
 162 gh

So, to learn something new about it makes for a special occasion.

ripgrep already has built in support for ignoring files based on your .gitignore file. I’ve known this for a while. And I’ve read this line in the README before, too…

Namely, ripgrep won’t search files ignored by your .gitignore/.ignore/.rgignore files, it won’t search hidden files and it won’t search binary files. Automatic filtering can be disabled with rg -uuu.

So, I knew ripgrep had its own ignore file. But I never knew why I might care. It felt weird. Then I realized why.

Check out this snippet:

Terminal window
$ rg FirstName
src/lib/Foo.Lib/Data/Migrations/20251001172535_SomeRandomEnhancements.Designer.cs
2850:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
4295:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
5326:                    b.Property<string>("FatherFirstName")
5349:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
5418:                    b.Property<string>("MotherFirstName")
5555:                    b.Property<string>("SpouseFirstName")
5690:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
8135:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
12923:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")


src/lib/Foo.Lib/Models/PersonModel.cs
8:    public string FirstName { get; set; } = string.Empty;


src/lib/Foo.Lib/Data/Migrations/20251106142304_OtherMigration.Designer.cs
2853:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
4298:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
5329:                    b.Property<string>("FatherFirstName")
5352:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
5421:                    b.Property<string>("MotherFirstName")
5558:                    b.Property<string>("SpouseFirstName")
5693:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
8146:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")
12960:                    b.Property<string>("FirstName")

The migration designer file is pure noise when I’m looking for usage. Multiply this times every migration file in the source. Or, if you still have a system with minified javascript in source (not every project has switched to package.json, still)? Even worse.

If I add a new .rgignore file, though, that has this line:

src/lib/Foo.Lib/Data/Migrations/*.Designer.cs
*.min.js
*.min.css
*.js.map

It now will only show the match I care about:

Terminal window
$ rg FirstName
src/lib/Foo.Lib/Models/PersonModel.cs
8:    public string FirstName { get; set; } = string.Empty;

Disclaimer - there is a risk that you’ll miss matches with this. But that’s why ripgrep has support to disable the filters, too.

Hope this helps someone out there.