ripgrep
Unlicense/MIT recursive grep that respects .gitignore
Rust / Terminal · Unlicense · 69.2k
Reviewed 2026-09-09 · last push 2026-08-04 · repo checked 2026-10-19
What's Good
Unlicense OR MIT — permissive dual-license. Blazing fast recursive search with sane defaults: respects .gitignore, skips binaries, and colors output. Regex engine written in Rust with optional PCRE2. Literal optimizations, parallel directory traversal, and memory-mapped files. The speed baseline other search tools benchmark against.
The Catch
Vs grep (POSIX baseline) and ag/The Silver Searcher (predecessor): ripgrep is the modern default, not a POSIX drop-in. If your workflow depends on GNU grep flags exactly, `rg` is similar but not identical. No built-in fuzzy matching — pair with fzf for interactive filtering.
Verdict
Unlicense/MIT grep replacement. Free forever; the search tool every terminal should alias.
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