The --pretty option doesn't override config file

[mrjoel]

What version of ripgrep are you using?

ripgrep 13.0.0
-SIMD -AVX (compiled)
+SIMD +AVX (runtime)

How did you install ripgrep?

Installed from Debian bookworm

What operating system are you using ripgrep on?

Debian

Describe your bug.

I use --no-heading \n --no-line-number in my config file referenced by RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH. I can explicitly add the --heading etc. options for a one-off commandline execution, but --pretty doesn't work as expected. I'd expect to have it be a true "convenience alias" as documented.

Instead, the output continues to use the options from the config file, including neither heading nor line numbers.

[BurntSushi]

Smaller demonstration without using a config file:

$ rg 'fn line_buffer' --no-heading --no-line-number
crates/searcher/src/searcher/mod.rs:    fn line_buffer(&self) -> LineBuffer {
$ rg 'fn line_buffer' --no-heading --no-line-number -p
crates/searcher/src/searcher/mod.rs:    fn line_buffer(&self) -> LineBuffer {

This may be difficult to fix, because the arg parser only permits overriding flags of the same name based on position. Technically the arg parser exposes APIs to generalize this to allow arbitrary flags to override others, but it's a significant complication. I'm not sure when or if this will get fixed unfortunately.

[BurntSushi]

Out of curiosity, why do you have --no-heading and --no-line-number in your config file? They seem somewhat odd things to disable by default. Especially since ripgrep will automatically disable those options (and color) when you output to something that isn't a tty. For example, rg foo | cat.

[mrjoel]

Out of curiosity, why do you have --no-heading and --no-line-number in your config file?

I'm just getting back to using rg on a regular basis. I have --no-heading for vertical space compactness, and --no-line-number mainly for eye muscle memory reading compatibility with regular grep output, but also stand-in compatibility for other scripts I have which parse grep output.

I have a strong preference for the vertical space compactness, and soft preference for no line number. Somewhat ironically, I like the direct TTY color output distinction for line number, and miss it when piping to less, and was trying to create a shell alias to include the --pretty option when I ran into this issue. It's not horribly inconvenient to use the spelled out version instead, just caught my off guard.

[BurntSushi]

but also stand-in compatibility for other scripts I have which parse grep output.

For this part at least, when ripgrep is redirected to a non-tty, it should "devolve" to standard grep format. This includes dropping line numbers and even file names when searching stdin (or a single file).