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Opposing/negating command-line options (eg. --no-hidden) #595

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CoryG89 opened this issue May 17, 2020 · 2 comments
Open

Opposing/negating command-line options (eg. --no-hidden) #595

CoryG89 opened this issue May 17, 2020 · 2 comments
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feature-request good first issue

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@CoryG89
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@CoryG89 CoryG89 commented May 17, 2020 •
edited

Background

First off, let me just say that I love your projects, bat and fd are great and I use them both regularly.

What I was looking for was something similar to the --no-hidden option as it exists in ripgrep. As in fd, in ripgrep hidden files are not searched by default. However with ripgrep I can create a global config that effectively changes it's behavior to search hidden files by default, and then still be able to pass a --no-hidden option in order to turn it back off on a case by case basis when desired. The logic that parses the command-line options would simply let subsequent opposing command-line options override prior ones. When I was looking around to see if this was possible, I found #362 where a global config file that was previously proposed, and I agree that aliases adequately satisfy the same use case.

Proposal

If so-called "opposing" command-line options such as --no-hidden were supported. Then it would be possible to define aliases such as

alias fd='fd --hidden'

which would effectively change the default options to search hidden files, and then if you wanted to ignore hidden files you could run something like:

fd --no-hidden

Similarly other "opposing" command-line options could be added where applicable, for example the currently supported --no-ignore could be complemented with a new --ignore option.

Just briefly looking at the currently supported options, here are some of the ones I feel could possibly be useful:

Currently Supported Option Potential "Opposing" Option
--hidden --no-hidden
--no-ignore --ignore
--no-ignore-vcs --ignore-vcs
--follow --no-follow
--fixed-strings --no-fixed-strings
--show-errors --no-show-errors
--absolute-path --relative-path
--full-path --no-full-path

Note that I haven't tested it, but for some currently supported options, this may or may not already be possible:

Currently Supported Option "Opposing" Supported Option
--case-sensitive --ignore-case
--glob foo* --exclude foo*

How do you feel about this? If you would be interested in supporting anything like this in fd that would be awesome. If it helped, I could offer to write an initial implementation. I do have a full-time day job so depending on how involved it ended up being I couldn't guarantee how quickly I could finish it, but I would definitely find some time to do it sooner or later. I would expect that the necessary changes would be mostly, if not fully contained within the command-line parsing logic, but I haven't actually looked into it so you never know.
@sharkdp
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@sharkdp sharkdp commented May 18, 2020 •
edited

Thank you for the feedback and for the detailed feature request. I agree with all points. To keep the --help text from exploding, we could maybe hide most/all of these negating command-line options and instead mention them in the respective "positive" option help text?

--glob foo* --exclude foo*

--exclude is not really the opposite of --glob. Both can be used at the same time:

fd --exclude '*.bkp' --glob 'example*'

However, --glob is kind of opposite to --regex (which is the default). The search pattern can either be interpreted as a regex or a glob. So users can already do this:

alias fd="fd --glob"

fd --regex '^example'

--exclude can be used with both --glob and --regex.
@kpym
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@kpym kpym commented Jun 7, 2020

May be another possibility is to have true and false values for all boolean switches, with true as default.

For example --hidden would be the same as --hidden=true and putting --hidden=false will negate a previous --hidden flag.

In this way you could use variable as values, like --hidden=$1.
@sharkdp sharkdp mentioned this issue Feb 15, 2021
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Labels
feature-request good first issue
3 participants
@CoryG89 @kpym @sharkdp