Searching through a set of files that are listed in a file.

[sje30]

Hi,

thanks for the rg.el package. I'm trying to set it up so that I can search all my org-mode files that are stored in lots of different directories under my home directory. I have a workflow from the shell, which is:

Step 1: find the .org files

This takes a few seconds to search through my home directory, and so I would like to cache the results in a file:

cd; fd -t f -e org > all-org.txt

(for context, there about nearly 1200 matches)

Step 2: search through that file list.

I can then use xargs to pass through the filenames (none of the filenames have spaces in them, else xargs -0 might be needed), and for example, here search for 'defun':

  cd; xargs -a all-org.txt rg defun

How best might I use rg.el to do similar, such that the rg buffer is more useful? Should I look into defining a new search? I have confirmed that if I do C-u M-x rg then add the xargs ... at the start of the command, it will work, but I'd rather not do that every time.

note: there has been discussion, not yet implemented, about adding --files-from flag to rg for this case: BurntSushi/ripgrep#273

[dajva]

This is not something that is currently not very well supported in this package. The main premise for this package are the three parameters, directory, query string and file-type/glob. Using full command line search means we can't modify the search parameters which cripples the result buffer. I know, the full command search is in there, just saying that this code path is not prioritized and is mostly there because of legacy compatibility with built-in grep package.
I do see the need for making this more flexible though, both for my own usage and some feature requests that pops up now and then.
To have this working I think we would have to modify rg-define-search a bit to accept full command searches as a special case.

[sje30]

Thanks for the considered reply. Happy to test if you incorporate something similar in the future.