grep: optional tgrep backend for large workspaces

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Avaliação

Dificuldade
5/5
Tempo estimado
Mais de uma semana
Facilidade para iniciantes
35/100
Tipo de issue
Funcionalidade
Clareza
Razoavelmente clara
Status de atividade
Ativa
Stack de tecnologia
git, node.js, typescript
Domínio
cli, performance, tooling

Direção de pesquisa

Start by locating the grep tool implementation, its settings, and the beforeToolCall interception path. Review how the built-in grep handles output_mode, head_limit, and offset, then check whether a live tgrep server is available before considering query behavior. Done means an opt-in backend uses tgrep only when safe, preserves the built-in output behavior, and falls back to ripgrep for unavailable servers or unsuitable patterns.

Escrita pelo modelo de indexação a partir do texto da issue.

Descrição

Feature Description

Let the grep tool run against a tgrep trigram index when one exists for the session root, and fall back to the bundled ripgrep otherwise. Opt-in, not a default change — tgrep only pays off with an index plus a live server, and it is slower than ripgrep on patterns the index cannot narrow.

Today there is no setting to change the grep backend, and a mod cannot register a tool named grep (colliding names are skipped with mod_error), so the only seam is beforeToolCall interception.

Use Case

On a 124,465-file / 29 GB workspace, a selective search such as TODO takes ~3.1s through the grep tool. Agents issue dozens per session, serially. With a live tgrep server the same search returns in 31ms end to end — 100x. Measured on macOS arm64, tgrep 1.2.5, ripgrep 15.2.0, warm cache, best of 5:

query ripgrep (full search) tgrep
TODO (selective, 1,280 files) 3.07s 31ms
function (broad, 65,004 matching lines) 3.37s 163ms
absent token 3.01s 16ms

For comparison, engine-to-engine with full output the broad case is only 1.2x (3.31s vs 2.83s); the 21x through a tool result comes from stopping at the page limit instead of materialising everything.

Additional Context

I built this as a mod and hit six things a native implementation would need to handle:

  1. output_mode defaults differ — the built-in is files_with_matches, tgrep is content, so -l must be passed when the field is absent.
  2. tgrep omits line numbers unless -n is given explicitly.
  3. head_limit/offset need a stream that aborts at offset + limit + 1 lines; buffering a broad match set hit 23 MB and a 285k-line result.
  4. An index without a running server is not safe. It silently misses files written since the build. Reproduced: a newly created file returned exit 1 (no matches) from tgrep while ripgrep found it. A native backend should require a live server, not just an index on disk.
  5. A cheap tgrep status . probe gates it (0.00s live, 0.08s dead), plus a stderr check for falling back to local index to cover a server dying mid-query.
  6. Patterns with no literal trigrams scan every indexed file — \d{9,} took 40.5s against ripgrep's 3.0s — so a timeout fallback or trigram heuristic is required. My mod caps at 30s and then defers to the built-in.

Prototype with methodology, raw output and limitations: https://github.com/Hashimlokasher/cmd-mod-tgrep-grep (BENCHMARKS.md). tgrep also powers GitHub Copilot CLI's grep, so it is actively maintained.

Proposal: a grep.backend: "tgrep" setting, or auto-detect when tgrep is installed and a live index is present, keeping ripgrep as the default and the fallback. Happy to test or contribute.

Priority: Important for my workflow

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Forks
377
Merge médio
1d 3h
PRs com merge (30d)
6

Preparar o ambiente

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Primeiros passos

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  3. Faça um fork do repositório e trabalhe em uma branch.
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