The same question grep answers, asked the way ripgrep asks it — which is why hands reach for it. With no path at all it searches everything below where you are standing, where grep wants -r before it will; it numbers the lines; and it groups them under the note they came from rather than putting the name in front of every one.

Every name it prints is a link, as everything in this shell is.

Flags may be written anywhere on the line. rg beta -i is a case-insensitive search, where grep beta -i is a search for beta in a file called -i — ripgrep is not getopt, and neither is this.

What it leaves alone

Names beginning with a dot, until --hidden asks for them, and the rule is about the whole path: a note inside a hidden directory is hidden too. It says nothing about a hidden file it could not have read, because it never opened one — which is the difference between rg and rg --hidden in ~, where .ssh is nobody’s business but the owner’s.

What it cannot read it names, in the words Rust puts on a failed open — which in ~ takes --hidden, since everything there that a guest may not read begins with a dot:

$ rg --hidden beans
.zsh_history: Permission denied (os error 13)
.ssh: Permission denied (os error 13)

and it carries on with the rest. There is no .gitignore on this machine, so hidden is the only thing it skips.

Through a pipe

One line per match with the name in front, because that is what another program can read: rg -l is | wc -l. ls drops its columns through a pipe for the same reason, and real rg does exactly this when it is not talking to a terminal.

What it answers

0 when it found something, 1 when it did not, 2 when it could not look — grep’s statuses, which is what makes if rg -q vegan; then a question.

Two things to know about the text it searches: a note is the note as the site renders it, so the frontmatter is not in it and a line is a paragraph; and the pattern is a JavaScript regular expression rather than Rust’s. Anything you would type at a prompt behaves the same.