🐛 walls of text produced for minified js when using `rg --json` input

[mgkurtz]

Experienced behavior

When input comes from ripgrep’s rg --json, delta shows minified js files in one loooooooong line potentially covering several screens. This hampers my workflow each time it appears, which is relatively often, given that piping ripgrep’s json output into delta is my default search setup.

Expected behavior

Respect the --max-line-length option and truncate long lines for json input as well.

Notes

Ripgrep itself ignores its --max-columns option for --json output, one could also fix that. Though, I believe this to be better fixed on delta’s side.

Example

A screenshot produced by feeding some ripgrep output into delta.

[mgkurtz]

For now, I am working around this issue by massaging the json in between going from rg to delta using jq: the script below truncates long lines, deletes submatches starting behind the truncation and sets the end to the end of the 6 added bytes […] for submatches ending behind the truncation:

_shorten_rg_output() {
  jq --compact-output ".data |=
    if .lines.text | rtrimstr(\"\\n\") | length >= $1+4 then
      .lines.text |= .[0:$1] + \" […]\" |
      .submatches |= map(
        if .start >= $1 then
          empty
        elif .end > $1 then
          .end = $1+6
        end
      )
    end
  "
}

I hope, that a similar approach can be implemented in delta itself.

Now, with the same ripgrep output as above, <rg-long-line.json _shorten_rg_output 400 | delta truncates the long lines to 400 characters:

To use in production, I have a shell function mysearch (actually with a shorter name) usable as mysearch foobar to search for foobar with rg and show results with delta:

mysearch() { rg --json "$@" | _shorten_rg_output 400 | delta; }