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
See the README and comments in the build.rs. Basically, this embeds an
XML file that I guess is a way of setting configuration knobs on
Windows. One of those knobs is enabling long path support. You still
need to enable it in your registry (lol), but this will handle the other
half of it.
Fixes#364, Closes#2049
We use '+++' syntax to output a literal '**' for a '--glob' example.
This '+++' syntax is pretty ugly when rendered literally via --help. We
fix this by hackily inserting the '+++' syntax for its one specific case
that we need it during man page generation.
Not ideal but it works. And --help still has some '*foo*' markup, but we
live with that for now.
Fixes#1581
It doesn't really belong in the man page since it's an artifact of a
build/runtime configuration. Moreover, it inhibits reproducible builds.
Fixes#1441
This is why I was so intent on clearing the PR queue. This will
effectively invalidate all existing patches, so I wanted to start from a
clean slate.
We do make one little tweak: we put the default type definitions in
their own file and tell rustfmt to keep its grubby mits off of it. We
also sort it lexicographically and hopefully will enforce that from here
on.
This commit fixes a bug where AsciiDoc would drop any line containing a
'{foo}' because it interpreted it as an undefined attribute reference:
> Simple attribute references take the form {<name>}. If the attribute name
> is defined its text value is substituted otherwise the line containing the
> reference is dropped from the output.
See: https://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/chunked/ch30.html
We fix this by simply replacing all occurrences of '{' and '}' with
their escaped forms: '{' and '}'.
Fixes#1101
This also updates some code to make use of our more liberal versioning
requirement, including the use of crossbeam-channel instead of the MsQueue
from the older an unmaintained crossbeam 0.3. This does regrettably add
a sizable number of dependencies, however, compile times seem mostly
unaffected.
Closes#1019
This commit does the work to delete the old `grep` crate and effectively
rewrite most of ripgrep core to use the new libripgrep crates. The new
`grep` crate is now a facade that collects the various crates that make
up libripgrep.
The most complex part of ripgrep core is now arguably the translation
between command line parameters and the library options, which is
ultimately where we want to be.
This fixes CI to handle the new documentation files. We also continue to
do more cleanup. In particular, we devise a nicer way of detecting the
most recent Cargo OUT_DIR by writing a dummy file, and looking for the
most recently modified version of that file.
This commit adds support for hidden flags. The purpose of hidden flags
is for things that end users likely won't need unless they have a
configuration file that disables ripgrep's defaults. These flags will
provide a way to re-enable ripgrep's defaults.
This commit uses the recent refactoring for defining flags to
automatically generate a man page. This finally allows us to define the
documentation for each flag in a single place.
The man page is generated on every build, if and only if `asciidoc` is
installed. When generated, it is placed in Cargo's `OUT_DIR` directory,
which is the same place that shell completions live.
This commit makes the git hash ripgrep was built with available for use
in the version string.
We also do a few minor touchups in build.rs and src/app.rs.
This commit updates clap to v2.23.0
The update contained a bug fix in clap that results in broken code in
ripgrep. ripgrep was relying on the bug, but this commit fixes that
issue. The bug centered around not being able to override the
auto-generated help message by supplying a flag with a long of `help`.
Normally, supplying a flag with a long of `help` means whenever the user
passes `--help`, the consuming code (e.g. ripgrep) is responsible for
displaying the help message. However, due to the bug in clap this wasn't
necessary for ripgrep to do unless the user passed `-h`. With the bug
fixed, it meant the user passing `--help` and clap expected ripgrep to
display the help, yet ripgrep expected clap to display the help. This
has been fixed in this commit of ripgrep.
All well now!
v2.23.0 also brings the abilty to use `Arg::help` or `Arg::long_help`
allowing one to distinguish between `-h` and `--help`. This commit
leaves all doc strings in the `lazy_static!` hashmap however only for
aesthetic reasons.
This means all home rolled handling of `-h`/`--help` has been removed
from ripgrep, yet functionality *and* appearances are 100% the same.
The --max-filesize option allows filtering files which are larger than
the specified limit. This is potentially useful if one is attempting to
search a number of large files without common file-types/suffixes.
See #369.
There were two important reasons for the switch:
1. Performance. Docopt does poorly when the argv becomes large, which is
a reasonable common use case for search tools. (e.g., use with xargs)
2. Better failure modes. Clap knows a lot more about how a particular
argv might be invalid, and can therefore provide much clearer error
messages.
While both were important, (1) made it urgent.
Note that since Clap requires at least Rust 1.11, this will in turn
increase the minimum Rust version supported by ripgrep from Rust 1.9 to
Rust 1.11. It is therefore a breaking change, so the soonest release of
ripgrep with Clap will have to be 0.3.
There is also at least one subtle breaking change in real usage.
Previous to this commit, this used to work:
rg -e -foo
Where this would cause ripgrep to search for the string `-foo`. Clap
currently has problems supporting this use case
(see: https://github.com/kbknapp/clap-rs/issues/742),
but it can be worked around by using this instead:
rg -e [-]foo
or even
rg [-]foo
and this still works:
rg -- -foo
This commit also adds Bash, Fish and PowerShell completion files to the
release, fixes a bug that prevented ripgrep from working on file
paths containing invalid UTF-8 and shows short descriptions in the
output of `-h` but longer descriptions in the output of `--help`.
Fixes#136, Fixes#189, Fixes#210, Fixes#230
