Title: File search passes empty ripgrep type and fails

Open Beginner friendly

#3,295 opened on Aug 28, 2026 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 2/5
Estimated time: 1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness: 65/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Active
Domain: cli, search

Research direction

Start at the file-search tool entry point where the ripgrep command is assembled, since the payload names no source file or test. Reproduce a search without a file type and inspect the generated arguments; done means the empty type produces no --type/-t argument while a valid type still works.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Title: File search passes empty ripgrep type and fails

Description

Copilot Desktop file/code searches fail across all projects with:

rg: unrecognized file type:

The file-search tool appears to pass an empty file type to ripgrep, equivalent to:

rg --type '' PATTERN

Reproduction

Open any project in Copilot Desktop.
Ask Copilot to search project files without specifying a language/file type.
Search fails with the error above.
Reproduces across all projects and sessions.

Observed

An empty type value fails consistently. A valid registered type such as js works.

Expected

When no file type is specified, omit the --type/-t argument entirely.

Environment

Copilot Desktop/CLI version: 1.0.80
OS: macOS Darwin
Date observed: August 28, 2026

Field	Value
App version	1.1.14
OS	macOS 27.0.0
Theme	GitHub
Path	/chat
Tenure	Week 3

Dominant language: No language data
Stars: 2.1k
Forks: 157
PR merge metrics: No merged PRs in 30d

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**Title:** File search passes empty ripgrep type and fails