Search your whole codebase fast with ripgrep

Once you have used ripgrep, plain grep on a big repo feels like waiting for a fax. rg searches huge trees almost instantly and skips the junk you never meant to search. A few flags cover most of what you need.

The default that makes it fast

rg is recursive by default and respects your .gitignore, so it skips node_modules, build output, and anything else you ignore, without you asking.

rg "useEffect"

That searches your whole project, minus the noise, in a blink.

Filter by file type

Narrow the search to the language you care about.

rg -t js "fetch("      # only JavaScript
rg -T test "TODO"      # skip test files

Run rg --type-list to see the built-in types.

See the surrounding lines

Context turns a match into something you can actually read.

rg -C 3 "throw new Error"   # 3 lines before and after

Use -B for lines before and -A for lines after when you only want one side.

Match whole words and be case-smart

rg -w "id"          # match "id" as a word, not "width" or "hidden"
rg -i "readme"      # case-insensitive

By default rg is case-sensitive unless you pass -i, or smart-case if you configure it.

Just the filenames

When you want to know which files match, not every line:

rg -l "deprecated"

Great for feeding a list into another command.

When you need the ignored stuff

Sometimes the thing you are hunting is in an ignored file.

rg --hidden --no-ignore "secret"

That searches dotfiles and ignored paths too, for the rare cases you need them.

Why it is worth the switch

The speed changes how you work. When search is instant, you search more, guess less, and find the real definition instead of grepping around it. Learn these few flags and rg becomes the fastest way to answer "where is this used?"