Consider making the CLI arguments consistent with ripgrep about fd

[unhammer]

I'd also love to have the -u / -uu as in ripgrep – it's annoying enough the first time you don't find something because it's in .gitignore, so it'd be nice if the UI to turn it off were consistent with other "modern unix tools" you're likely to have :-)

[sharkdp]

Let's consider all of fd's current command-line options:

• -a/--absolute-path => not related to ripgrep
• -s, --sensitive => ripgrep uses -s, --case-sensitive => change to ripgrep's format
• -f, --follow => ripgrep also uses --follow, but uses -L for the short flag (like find) => change to ripgrep's format
• -p, --full-path => not related to ripgrep
• -H, --hidden => ripgrep also uses --hidden, there is no short flag
• -n, --no-color => ripgrep uses --color never because there are more options => we would need to implement --color always and --color auto (fd's default) first => for now, I'll leave this as-is.
• -I, --no-ignore => ripgrep also uses --no-ignore, there is no short flag

Considering ripgrep's options, there is

• -u, --unrestricted: an alias for --no-ignore => could be implemented
• two occurences of -u/--unrestricted: an alias for --no-ignore --hidden => could be implemented
• three occurences ...: not relevant for fd

[epipping]

@sharkdp Using -L for following/dereferencing (i.e., treating a symlink like the object that it points to) is rather common. And it's not uncommon that the single-letter option does not use the first letter of the option name:

• GNU ls has -L, --dereference and BSD ls also uses -L for this purpose
• GNU and BSD find both have -L and -follow (the latter is deprecated)
• GNU cp has -L, --dereference and BSD cp also uses -L.
• rsync has -L, --copy-links which behaves in a similar fashion.

I would thus like to suggest going with ripgrep's -L, --follow.

(it's a bit of a stretch but one could even argue that curl's -L, --location fits the pattern if you view redirects as symlinks).

[sharkdp]

@epipping Fair points, you convinced me. Changed the action above.

[sharkdp]

-L is now the short-option for --follow. --dereference can be used as an alias.

[sharkdp]

I would like to keep the command-line interface as clean and simple as possible (i.e., I don't want the -h text to be several pages long), but adding -u seems like a good idea. We could possible hide it from the standard -h text and add it as a hidden option that would only be mentioned in a man page. It would be great if you could open a new ticket to track this.