Hyperlinked grep

This kitten allows you to search your files using ripgrep and open the results directly in your favorite editor in the terminal, at the line containing the search result, simply by clicking on the result you want.

To set it up, first create ~/.config/kitty/open-actions.conf with the following contents:

# Open any file with a fragment in vim, fragments are generated
# by the hyperlink_grep kitten and nothing else so far.
protocol file
fragment_matches [0-9]+
action launch --type=overlay vim +${FRAGMENT} ${FILE_PATH}

# Open text files without fragments in the editor
protocol file
mime text/*
action launch --type=overlay ${EDITOR} ${FILE_PATH}

Now, run a search with:

kitty +kitten hyperlinked_grep something

Hold down the ctrl+shift keys and click on any of the result lines, to open the file in vim at the matching line. If you use some editor other than vim, you should adjust the open-actions.conf file accordingly.

Finally, add an alias to your shell's rc files to invoke the kitten as hg:

alias hg='kitty +kitten hyperlinked_grep'

You can now run searches with:

hg some-search-term

If you want to enable completion, for the kitten, you can delegate completion to rg. For that, instead of using an alias create a simple wrapper script named hg somewhere in your PATH:

#!/bin/sh
exec kitty +kitten hyperlinked_grep "$@"

Then, for example, for ZSH, add the following to .zshrc:

compdef _rg hg

To learn more about kitty's powerful framework for customizing URL click actions, see here.

Hopefully, someday this functionality will make it into some upstream grep program directly removing the need for this kitten.

Note

While you can pass any of ripgrep's comand line options to the kitten and they will be forwarded to rg, do not use options that change the output formatting as the kitten works by parsing the output from ripgrep.