rga

rga (ripgrep-all) is a search tool that wraps ripgrep to enable regex searching across a wide variety of file formats beyond plain text. It recursively searches through archives and extracts searchable content from PDFs, Office documents (docx, odt), e-books (epub), SQLite databases, and multimedia files with subtitles or metadata.

The tool uses specialized adapters for different file types: pandoc for document conversion, poppler for PDF text extraction, ffmpeg for multimedia metadata and subtitles, and built-in handlers for archives (zip, tar, gz) and compressed files. It can detect file types by extension or mime type and supports nested archive searching with configurable recursion depth.

rga includes caching functionality to speed up repeated searches on the same files, storing extracted text in a local database. It integrates with fzf for interactive file searching and supports all of ripgrep's standard options and patterns. The tool is particularly useful for developers and researchers who need to search through mixed content repositories containing documentation, archives, and various file formats.

Installation

# via Homebrew
brew install rga

# via Arch Linux
pacman -S ripgrep-all

# via Chocolatey
choco install ripgrep-all

# via Cargo
cargo install --locked ripgrep_all