Size of output is 5 times bigger with ripgrep than with thesilversearcher for color=always

[edi9999]

This is very similar to this issue : #696.

But I think I found out what the underlying problem is.

rg --color always --colors line:fg:yellow --colors line:style:bold --colors path:fg:green --colors path:style:bold --colors match:fg:black --colors match:bg:yellow --colors match:style:nobold '.' --no-heading --line-number >/tmp/foo_rg
ag '.' --color --nogroup --column > /tmp/foo_ag

When I then run :

cat /tmp/foo_rg | less -R
# and 
cat /tmp/foo_ag | less -R

I see that the output colors are "similar", but the size of the files are very different :

ls -lah /tmp/foo*
-rw-r--r-- 1 edgar edgar  22M Jan 29 10:48 /tmp/foo_ag
-rw-r--r-- 1 edgar edgar 109M Jan 29 10:48 /tmp/foo_rg

And the number of lines in each file is the same.

I have taken a screenshot of the same lines of each efile for api/check.py:
On top is the ripgrep output, On the bottom the ag output :

As you can see, ripgrep has a huge amount of escape sequences that ag doesn't have.

[okdana]

That doesn't seem ideal, but it's only relevant in cases where rg has been asked to match individual characters — e.g., patterns like . and \w. .* for example does not have that problem (though rg is still a little more noisy with the format stuff than ag because it doesn't combine sequences).

I don't use fzf but it doesn't seem likely that the original reporter from #696 would have been searching for a pattern like . (right?). Maybe there could be some interplay between the way rg outputs sequences and whatever fzf does with them, though, idk

[BurntSushi]

This is indeed interesting! I agree that we should probably fix this. It might make sense to delay fixing this until the printer is refactored though.

[edi9999]

Yes, the usecase in fzf is really to query with . , this way, we actually have all lines which we then filter throuhg fzf (which is an interactive grep). I find it good to be able to search for . because this makes the search more interactive, if for example I type seacr instead of searc, I will see immediately that there are no more results.

[okdana]

Ohh. That makes sense then