Document .ignore (was: ripgrep-specific ignore file)

[SimonSapin]

Only after I finished typing in full a feature request (preserved below) did I find out about .ignore files by reading other issues suggested by GitHub.

• https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/d1e4d28f3/README.md only mentions .gitignore and the ignore crate
• https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/d1e4d28f3/ignore/README.md mentions .ignore exactly once
• To be fair, rg --help does mention .ignore multiple times.

Since that name is hard to look up in a search engine, I’m not sure what other tools also consider .ignore by default and whether I wouldn’t want that for some use cases. What other tools do you know of that do?

What do you think could be ways to more prominently document .ignore?

---

Feature request for .rgignore

What version of ripgrep are you using?

ripgrep 11.0.1
-SIMD -AVX (compiled)
+SIMD +AVX (runtime)

How did you install ripgrep?

cargo install

What operating system are you using ripgrep on?

Ubuntu 18.04

Describe your question, feature request, or bug.

Some code repositories contain generated files (with long lines) that should be excluded from being searched by ripgrep. Currently this can be done by adding a pattern to .gitignore, but this of course also makes the files ignored by git.

It would be nice to have a file, possibly named .rgignore, that lists patterns to be ignored by ripgrep but not by version control systems.

If this is a bug, what are the steps to reproduce the behavior?

git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust
cd rust
rg ptr::NonNull

If this is a bug, what is the actual behavior?

The console is flooded with the entire contents of src/tools/rls/rls-analysis/test_data/rust-analysis/libcore-a5db6a3445116c08.json, which is a 3 MB single-line JSON file.

If this is a bug, what is the expected behavior?

The repository maintainers should have a way to specify that ``src/tools/rls/rls-analysis/test_data/rust-analysis/*.json` should be excluded from ripgrep results by default.

[BurntSushi]

It's also described in the guide: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/GUIDE.md#automatic-filtering

We could change .gitignore to .gitignore/.ignore/.rgignore in this section? https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/d1e4d28f3/README.md#why-should-i-use-ripgrep Otherwise I'm not sure. The README is just meant to give a high level overview.

[SimonSapin]

TIL about the guide, thanks!

Yes, I think that change would be good.