How to Use ripgrep/rg for Elegant Substring Search in Bash

The aim of this page📝 is to explain searching with `rg` in bash on MacOS based on the particular examples provided. I began looking into it after watching https://youtu.be/kgII-YWo3Zw?si=SmVBkGIQyy8NRTI0&t=2273.

1 min readFeb 25, 2024

rg was developed as a faster alternative to grep, optimized for searching large codebases.
it is amazingly fast, nicely colored and works OOTB — for me with the couple of basic flags for filtering files
To search for patterns in specific file types, use --type or -t with rg.
Use --glob of -g with rg to search for patterns in files matching a glob pattern.
My command for looking for “metalinguistic” in my knowledge base filtered to markdown files is simply

rg metaling -t md

combined with the Warp terminal, it’s cool how fast you get a list of clickable files containing the match of a pattern in a complex of subdirectories