Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)

One of my favorite moments in HN history was watching the authors of the various search tools decide on a common ".ignore" file as opposed to each having their own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568245

I don't remember why I didn't switch from ag, but I remember it was a conscious decision. I think it had something to do with configuration, rg using implicit '.ignore' file (a super-generic name instead of a proper tool-specific config) or even .gitignore, or something else very much unwarranted, that made it annoying to use. Cannot remember, really, only remember that I spent too much time trying to make it behave and decided it isn't worth it. Anyway, faster is nice, but somehow I don't ever feel that ag is too slow for anything. The switch from the previous one (what was it? ack?) felt like a drastic improvement, but ag vs. rg wasn't much difference to me in practice.

Such a good read. I actually went back though it the other day to steal the searching for the least common byte idea out to speed up my search tool https://github.com/boyter/cs which when coupled with the simd upper lower search technique from fzf cut the wall clock runtime by a third.

There was this post from cursor https://cursor.com/blog/fast-regex-search today about building an index for agents due to them hitting a limit on ripgrep, but I’m not sure what codebase they are hitting that warrants it. Especially since they would have to be at 100-200 GB to be getting to 15s of runtime. Unless it’s all matches that is.

fd:find::rg:grep

Someone please make an awesome new sed and awk.

I’ve read this multiple times over the years and this post is still the most interesting and informative piece describing the problem of making a fast grep-like tool. I love that it doesn’t just describe how ripgrep works but also how all the other tools work and then compares the various techniques. It’s simultaneously a tutorial and an expert deep dive. Just a beautiful piece of writing. In a perfect world, all code would be similarly documented.

I just got ripgrep ported to IRIX over the weekend.

It’s fast even on a 300mhz Octane.

I was using ripgrep once and it had a bug that led me downa terrifying rabbit hole - I can't recall what it was but it involved not being able to find text that absolutely should have been there.

Eventually I was considering rebuilding the machine completely but for some reason after a very long time digging deep into the rabbit hole I tried plain old grep and there was the data exactly where it should have been.

So it's such a vague story but it was a while back - I don't remember the specifics but I sure recall the panic.

still a good read

qgrep is faster if you're fine with indexing. worth it

And burntsushi is one of us: he's regularly here on HN. Big thanks to him. As soon as rg came out I was building it on Linux. Now it ships stocks with Debian (since Bookworm? Don't remember): thanks, thanks and more thanks.

(2016)

It’s a pure delight to read this docs / pitch.

Is it still?

(2024) gg: A fast, more lightweight ripgrep alternative for daily use cases

https://reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1fvzfnb/gg_a_fast_more_li...

> The binary name for `ripgrep` is `rg`.

I don’t understand when people typeset some name in verbatim, lowercase, but then have another name for the actual command. That’s confusing to me.

Programmers are too enarmored with lower-case names. Why not Ripgrep? Then I can surmise that there might not be some program ripgrep(1) (there might be a shorter version), since using capital letters is not traditional for CLI programs.

Look at Stacked Git:

https://stacked-git.github.io/

> Stacked Git, StGit for short, is an application for managing Git commits as a stack of patches.

> ... The `stg` command line tool ...

Now, I’ve been puzzled in the past when inputing `stgit` doesn’t work. But here they call it StGit for short and the actual command is typeset in verbatim (stg(1) would have also worked).

ugrep is my daily driver. https://ugrep.com

The TUI is great, and approximate matches are insanely useful.

Hasn’t someone rewritten ripgrep in rust by now? C’mon it’s 2026. Oh wait it was written in Rust (back in 2016).

[dead]

It seems to me that `rg` is the number one most important part that enables LLMs to be smart agents in a codebase. Who would have thought that a code search tool would enable AGI?