Inverse of `.ignore` file (like `.include`) or explicit include support in `.ignore` file

[etosan]

ag and some other tools support .ignore file, where one can exclude searching in specific files and directories that are of no interest.

Unfortunately in some projects, like for example gitea managed ones, there are hidden dirs like .gitea that one would like ag to search through anyway, by default, especially when dealing with IaC monorepos and similar (as action workflows live there etc).

It would be great, if one could have explicit inclusions for such dirs defined in .ignore-file for exemaple by following .gitignore's !something pattern to explicitly include given path.

Would this be possible?

[thomasjm]

I was expecting this to work with "!" syntax and was surprised to find that it doesn't.

Seems like ripgrep supports it out of the box.

[etosan]

@thomasjm I am hitting this problem more and more recently, and it seems that development rate on ag has slowed down. Would you consider ripgrep sufficient replacement for ag feature wise?

Inability to negate exclusions is becoming show-stopper for me.

[thomasjm]

Well, ripgrep has almost twice the GitHub stars.

There are a lot of details comparing them in this blog post: https://burntsushi.net/ripgrep/

At this point I only use ag because the Emacs Helm integration is better than the ripgrep equivalent.

[etosan]

Yeah with ag<->ripgrep theme I see myself using ripgrep more and more, locally, just because of missing this feature. It seems that ag has entered it's "maintenance only" mode project stage. Only reason why I still use ag are remote enterprise distros where rg will take some time to settle.