TL;DR — Quick Summary

rga (ripgrep-all) searches inside PDFs, Word docs, e-books, zip archives, SQLite databases, and more. All the speed of ripgrep, but for any file format.

rga searches everything. PDFs, docs, zips, databases — ripgrep for all file types.

Installation

# macOS
brew install rga

# Also install adapters
brew install poppler tesseract pandoc

Usage

# Search all supported files recursively
rga 'search term'

# Search PDFs only
rga --rga-adapters=poppler 'search term'

# Interactive with fzf preview
rga-fzf 'search term'

# Disable cache
rga --rga-no-cache 'pattern'

# List supported adapters
rga --rga-list-adapters

Supported Formats

  • Documents: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT
  • E-books: EPUB, FB2
  • Archives: ZIP, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, ZSTD
  • Databases: SQLite
  • Media: Images (OCR via tesseract), subtitles (SRT)

Summary

  • rga extends ripgrep to search inside binary files
  • Searches PDFs, Office docs, e-books, archives, databases
  • Caches extracted text for fast re-searches
  • rga-fzf for interactive fuzzy search with preview
  • Written in Rust — fast as ripgrep