For those who don’t know, deadgrip is an Emacs interface to ripgrep. It displays the results in an Emacs buffer along with some ancillary information. Check the example at the deadgrip link for some example output. Ripgrep, of course, is a powerful and speedy grep utility; deadgrep provides a nice interface for Emacs users. It’s a bit like counsel-rg but provides a little more context.
James Dyer is a deadgrep user but wanted a little more flexibility. Normally, he’d like to search for whatever’s at point and he almost always wants to search his entire user directory rather than the current directory. When he’s in a Dired buffer, though, he just wants to enter the search string because the Dired buffer mostly has file and directory names.
He has an alternate form that does the same thing but uses the current directory. Between the two functions he has most of his needs covered. The amount of code he needed for this is minimal and easily copied to your init.el. If you’re not a deadgrep user, you can very easily modify it to call ripgrep directly.
I’m happy with counsel-rg but if you’d like a slightly better display and a bit more flexibility, Dyer’s post is worth a look.