TODO Comment Search

Use ripgrep (rg) to find TODO-style comments quickly across projects. This is useful for local cleanup, release checks, and CI gates.

Quick search

rg --no-messages --vimgrep -H --column --line-number --color never \
  -e '(TODO|FIXME|BUG|HACK|XXX)' .

--vimgrep, -H, --column, and --line-number produce rows in this form:

path/to/file:line:column:matched text

Comment-aware search

This pattern looks for common comment prefixes, markdown task/list items, or a tag at the start of a line:

TAGS='BUG|HACK|FIXME|TODO|XXX|\[ \]|\[x\]'
PREFIX='//|#|<!--|;|/\*|^|^[[:blank:]]*(-|[0-9]+\.)'

rg --no-messages --vimgrep -H --column --line-number --color never \
  --max-columns=1000 --no-config \
  -e "(${PREFIX})[[:space:]]*(${TAGS})" \
  -g '!**/.git/**' \
  -g '!**/node_modules/**' \
  -g '!**/target/**' \
  -g '!**/.build/**' \
  .

Notes:

--no-config keeps personal rg config from changing project results.
--max-columns=1000 avoids dropping long lines too early.
Add -i for case-insensitive tags.
Add --hidden when dotfiles should be scanned too.

Project script

Add this as scripts/todos:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

TAGS='BUG|HACK|FIXME|TODO|XXX|\[ \]|\[x\]'
PREFIX='//|#|<!--|;|/\*|^|^[[:blank:]]*(-|[0-9]+\.)'

rg --no-messages --vimgrep -H --column --line-number --color never \
  --max-columns=1000 --no-config \
  -e "(${PREFIX})[[:space:]]*(${TAGS})" \
  -g '!**/.git/**' \
  -g '!**/node_modules/**' \
  -g '!**/target/**' \
  -g '!**/.build/**' \
  "$@" \
  .

Then:

chmod +x scripts/todos
scripts/todos

Filters

Use -g for include and exclude globs. A glob beginning with ! excludes matches.

# Only source and markdown paths
scripts/todos -g 'src/**' -g 'docs/**' -g '*.md'

# Exclude generated/vendor paths
scripts/todos -g '!**/vendor/**' -g '!**/dist/**' -g '!**/*.lock'

# Include hidden files
scripts/todos --hidden

CI check

Fail when TODO-style comments are present:

if scripts/todos >/tmp/todos.txt; then
  cat /tmp/todos.txt
  echo "TODO comments found"
  exit 1
fi