I agree, it's a great tool with a catastrophically wrong default that silently and unpredictably catches people off-guard. I've tried using ripgrep many times but have been burnt too many times and can never trust its search to be comprehensive. It absolutely fails to find important stuff, and I can rarely predict whether the files it's going to skip intersect with my files of interest. And at this point I'm too burnt to care to pass flags to stop it from doing that. Which basically means I always run grep unless I know the number of matches beforehand and it's too large a directory to wait a few seconds for, in which case I run grep after rg fails to find it.

If it actually matched grep's contract with opt-in differences that'd be a gamechanger and actually let it become the default for people, but that ship seems to have sailed.

idk if this was your issue but I’m posting this because it’s not obvious (especially the default behavior):

  rg      : Searches git tracked files
  rg -u   : Includes .gitignored files
  rg -uu  : Includes .gitignored + hidden files
  rg -uuu : Includes .gitignored + hidden + binary files

Was it confirmed to be a bug?

Sometimes I forget that some of the config files I have for CI in a project are under a dot directory, and therefore ignored by rg by default, so I have to repeat the search giving the path to that config files subdirectory if I want to see the results that are under that one (or use some extra flags for rg to not ignore dot directories other than .git)

Was the file in a .gitignore by any chance? I've got my home folder in git to keep track of dot/config files and that always catches me out. Really dislike it defaulting to that ignoring files that are ignored by git.

I had that happen too recently… Basically rg x would show nothing but grep -r x showed the lines for any x. Tried multiple times with different x, then I kept using grep -r at that time. After a few days, I started using rg again and it worked fine but now I tend to use grep -r occasionally too to make sure.

Maybe related to text encodings?

I think riggrep will not search UTF-16 files by default. I had some such issue once at least.

Could have been an incorrectly inferred encoding scheme?

I ran into that with pt, and it definitely made me think I was going mad[0]. I can't fully remember if rg suffered from the same issue or not.

[0] https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher/issu...