machine interface

[albfan]

Hi, I'm the maintainer of https://github.com/albfan/ag.vim

Someone ask me to integrate with rg, and after trying it is sensibly faster than ag so want to ask if it's possible to add an option to expose results in a parseable way ready for machines.

By now I'm parsing filename, column, line and contents from --group option so this is not a stopper, but would be great to offer results that way to ease maintenance and complex features like hightlight code

Maybe --porceain could be a great name for option. Anything will work

[kpp]

How about existing --vimgrep?

[tiehuis]

#244 is related. May be worthwhile to see if what is outlined there differs from your requirements.

[albfan]

I use mostly search with context:

$ rg foo -C4

Those contexts lines are really useful, so I really work on AgGroup (not the commands related with quicklist). Parsing results with context slows the interaction and is error prone

@tiehuis That would help to highlight without reprocess regex (with the escape characters hell)

Deterministic results like:

file: foo
   - matches: [
        {
            line: 1,
            col: 10,
            match: foo,
            before: 3,
            after: 4,
            result: "asdfasdfasdf
asdfsadfasdf
foo
asfasdfasdf
"         
 },
...
]

etc etc woud be great as there's lot of info rg knows but do not expose (reflected in highlights for example)

[tiehuis]

Just to add, here (#359) was a similar issue regarding structured output (which looks very much the same as what you are suggesting) and a response from BurntSushi.

[albfan]

@tiehuis Thanks that's exactly what I need.

I was afraid to ask for a library, but seems there's a work in progress. That's perfect for another idea I have for rg (use on gnome builder as a global search albfan/gnome-builder#14)

Then we need to contribute on rg library. That makes sense, thanks!