I love Emacs, but one of the things I miss from Visual Studio Code is a good code search feature.
The built-in grep command is powerful, but it's not very easy to use,
and the search results can be difficult to navigate, especially in large codebases.
There are many third-party packages that try to solve this problem, but most of them have the same issues:
they're either difficult to use or the search results are hard to navigate.
However, there is one package called rg.el that does a great job of fixing both of these problems.
rg.el is a wrapper for the ripgrep command-line tool, which is a very fast and powerful code search tool.
ripgrep understands file types and comes with a good set of defaults,
so you don't need to worry about writing complex regex patterns.
rg.el also has a fantastic transient-based UI system that makes it easy to manipulate the search results.
For example, you can easily exclude (or include) certain patterns from the results by adding a --glob flag to your search.
For example, if you're working on a Go project and you want to search for the function encodeBase64,
you can use the following command to exclude all test files from the results:
rg-project encodeBase64 --glob='!*test.go'
This is great, but there's one issue. rg.el only allows you to specify one --glob flag at a time. This is fine in some cases,
but there are times when you need to exclude multiple patterns.
Fortunately, there's a workaround. You can set the global variable rg-command-line-flags to an array of strings of custom flags,
and all of those strings will be passed to ripgrep command.
if you're unsure how to do this, here's a step-by-step example:
1) Press M-: to activate the eval prompt in the minibuffer.
2) Set the variable to your desired values, for instance:
(setq rg-command-line-flags '("-g '!*_test.go'" "-g '!*foo.go'")).
You only need to do this once, and all subsequent searches will be affected by it. To disable this behavior, simply set rg-command-line-flags to nil.
I wish rg.el supported multiple filters in its UI, but this workaround is fine for me for the time being.
Conclusion
rg.el is a great code search package for Emacs. It's easy to use and the search results are easy to navigate.
If you're looking for a good code search solution for Emacs, I highly recommend rg.el.