Search hidden directories with ripgrep, by default

Do you use rg (ripgrep) all the time on the command line? Yes, so do I. An annoying problem with it is that, by default, it does not search hidden directories.

"A file or directory is considered hidden if its base name starts with a dot character (.)."

One such directory, that is very important in my git/GitHub-based projects (which is all of mine by the way) is the .github directory. So I cd into a directory and it finds nothing:

cd ~/dev/remix-peterbecom
rg actions/setup-node
# Empty! I.e. no results

It doesn't find anything because the file .github/workflows/test.yml is part of a hidden directory.

The quick solution to this is to use --hidden:

❯ rg --hidden actions/setup-node
.github/workflows/test.yml
20:        uses: actions/setup-node@v4

I find it very rare that I would not want to search hidden directories. So I added this to my ~/.zshrc file:

alias rg='rg --hidden'

Now, this happens:

❯ rg actions/setup-node
.github/workflows/test.yml
20:        uses: actions/setup-node@v4

With that being set, it's actually possible to "undo" the behavior. You can use --no-hidden

❯ rg --no-hidden actions/setup-node

And that can useful if there is a hidden directory that is not git ignored yet. For example .download-cache/.