Hyperlinked grep

Note

As of ripgrep versions newer that 13.0 it supports hyperlinks natively so you can just add the following alias in your shell rc file: alias rg="rg --hyperlink-format=kitty" no need to use this kitten. But, see below for instructions on how to customize kitty to have it open the hyperlinks from ripgrep in your favorite editor.

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.

New in version 0.19.0.

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 --cwd=current vim +${FRAGMENT} ${FILE_PATH}

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

Now, run a search with:

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="kitten hyperlinked_grep"

You can now run searches with:

hg some-search-term

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

By default, this kitten adds hyperlinks for several parts of ripgrep output: the per-file header, match context lines, and match lines. You can control which items are linked with a --kitten hyperlink flag. For example, --kitten hyperlink=matching_lines will only add hyperlinks to the match lines. --kitten hyperlink=file_headers,context_lines will link file headers and context lines but not match lines. --kitten hyperlink=none will cause the command line to be passed to directly to rg so no hyperlinking will be performed. --kitten hyperlink may be specified multiple times.

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 command 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. The unsupported options are: --context-separator, --field-context-separator, --field-match-separator, --json, -I --no-filename, -0 --null, --null-data, --path-separator. If you specify options via configuration file, then any changes to the default output format will not be supported, not just the ones listed.