ripgrep began it's life with docopt for argument parsing. Then it moved
to Clap and stayed there for a number of years. Clap has served ripgrep
well, and it probably could continue to serve ripgrep well, but I ended
up deciding to move off of it.
Why?
The first time I had the thought of moving off of Clap was during the
2->3->4 transition. I thought the 3.x and 4.x releases were great, but
for me, it ended up moving a little too quickly. Since the release of
4.x was telegraphed around when 3.x came out, I decided to just hold off
and wait to migrate to 4.x instead of doing a 3.x migration followed
shortly by another 4.x migration. Of course, I just never ended up doing
the migration at all. I never got around to it and there just wasn't a
compelling reason for me to upgrade. While I never investigated it, I
saw an upgrade as a non-trivial amount of work in part because I didn't
encapsulate the usage of Clap enough.
The above is just what got me started thinking about it. It wasn't
enough to get me to move off of it on its own. What ended up pushing me
over the edge was a combination of factors:
* As mentioned above, I didn't want to run on the migration treadmill.
This has proven to not be much of an issue, but at the time of the
2->3->4 releases, I didn't know how long Clap 4.x would be out before a
5.x would come out.
* The release of lexopt[1] caught my eye. IMO, that crate demonstrates
exactly how something new can arrive on the scene and just thoroughly
solve a problem minimalistically. It has the docs, the reasoning, the
simple API, the tests and good judgment. It gets all the weird corner
cases right that Clap also gets right (and is part of why I was
originally attracted to Clap).
* I have an overall desire to reduce the size of my dependency tree. In
part because a smaller dependency tree tends to correlate with better
compile times, but also in part because it reduces my reliance and trust
on others. It lets me be the "master" of ripgrep's destiny by reducing
the amount of behavior that is the result of someone else's decision
(whether good or bad).
* I perceived that Clap solves a more general problem than what I
actually need solved. Despite the vast number of flags that ripgrep has,
its requirements are actually pretty simple. We just need simple
switches and flags that support one value. No multi-value flags. No
sub-commands. And probably a lot of other functionality that Clap has
that makes it so flexible for so many different use cases. (I'm being
hand wavy on the last point.)
With all that said, perhaps most importantly, the future of ripgrep
possibly demands a more flexible CLI argument parser. In today's world,
I would really like, for example, flags like `--type` and `--type-not`
to be able to accumulate their repeated values into a single sequence
while respecting the order they appear on the CLI. For example, prior
to this migration, `rg regex-automata -Tlock -ttoml` would not return
results in `Cargo.lock` in this repository because the `-Tlock` always
took priority even though `-ttoml` appeared after it. But with this
migration, `-ttoml` now correctly overrides `-Tlock`. We would like to
do similar things for `-g/--glob` and `--iglob` and potentially even
now introduce a `-G/--glob-not` flag instead of requiring users to use
`!` to negate a glob. (Which I had done originally to work-around this
problem.) And some day, I'd like to add some kind of boolean matching to
ripgrep perhaps similar to how `git grep` does it. (Although I haven't
thought too carefully on a design yet.) In order to do that, I perceive
it would be difficult to implement correctly in Clap.
I believe that this last point is possible to implement correctly in
Clap 2.x, although it is awkward to do so. I have not looked closely
enough at the Clap 4.x API to know whether it's still possible there. In
any case, these were enough reasons to move off of Clap and own more of
the argument parsing process myself.
This did require a few things:
* I had to write my own logic for how arguments are combined into one
single state object. Of course, I wanted this. This was part of the
upside. But it's still code I didn't have to write for Clap.
* I had to write my own shell completion generator.
* I had to write my own `-h/--help` output generator.
* I also had to write my own man page generator. Well, I had to do this
with Clap 2.x too, although my understanding is that Clap 4.x supports
this. With that said, without having tried it, my guess is that I
probably wouldn't have liked the output it generated because I
ultimately had to write most of the roff by hand myself to get the man
page I wanted. (This also had the benefit of dropping the build
dependency on asciidoc/asciidoctor.)
While this is definitely a fair bit of extra work, it overall only cost
me a couple days. IMO, that's a good trade off given that this code is
unlikely to change again in any substantial way. And it should also
allow for more flexible semantics going forward.
Fixes#884, Fixes#1648, Fixes#1701, Fixes#1814, Fixes#1966
[1]: https://docs.rs/lexopt/0.3.0/lexopt/index.html
This commit adds `anyhow` as a dependency and switches over to it from
Box<dyn Error>.
It actually looks like I've kept all of my errors rather shallow, such
that we don't get a huge benefit from anyhow at present. But now that
anyhow is in use, I expect to use its "context" feature more going
forward.
I originally did not put PathPrinter into grep-printer because I
considered it somewhat extraneous to what a "grep" program does, and
also that its implementation was rather simple. But now with hyperlink
support, its implementation has grown a smidge more complicated. And
more importantly, its existence required exposing a lot more of the
hyperlink guts. Without it, we can keep things like HyperlinkPath and
HyperlinkSpan completely private.
We can now also keep `PrinterPath` completely private as well. And this
is a breaking change.
Previously, sorting worked by sorting the parents and then sorting the
children within each parent. This was done during traversal, but it only
works when sorting parents preserves the overall order. This generally
only works for '--sort path' in ascending order.
This commit fixes the rest of the sorting behavior by collecting all of
the paths to search and then sorting them before searching. We only
collect all of the paths when sorting was requested.
Fixes#2243, Closes#2361
Adds a new eprintln_locked macro which locks STDOUT before logging
to STDERR. This patch also replaces instances of eprintln with
eprintln_locked to avoid interleaving lines.
Fixes#1941, Closes#1968
This was once part of ripgrep, but at some point, was unintentionally
removed. The value of this warning is that since ripgrep tries to be
"smart" by default, it can be surprising if it doesn't search certain
things. This warning covers the case when ripgrep searches *nothing*,
which happens somewhat more frequently than you might expect. e.g., If
you're searching within an ignore directory.
Note that for now, we only print this message when the user has not
supplied any explicit paths. It's not clear that we want to print this
otherwise, and in particular, it seems that the message shows up too
eagerly. e.g., 'rg foo does-not-exist' will both print an error about
'does-not-exist' not existing, *and* the message about no files being
searched, which seems annoying in this case. We can always refine this
logic later.
Fixes#1404, Closes#1762
The top-level listing was just getting a bit too long for my taste. So
put all of the code in one directory and shrink the large top-level mess
to a small top-level mess.
NOTE: This commit only contains renames. The subsequent commit will
actually make ripgrep build again. We do it this way with the naive hope
that this will make it easier for git history to track the renames.
Sigh.
