ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift} (via) Andrew Gallant's post from September 2016 introducing ripgrep, the command-line grep tool he wrote using Rust (on top of the Rust regular expression library also written by Andrew). ripgrep is a beautifully designed CLI interface and is crazy fast, and this post describes how it gets its performance in a huge amount of detail, right down to comparing the different algorithmic approaches used by other similar tools.
I recently learned that ripgrep ships as part of VS Code, which is why VS Code's search-across-project feature is so fast. In fact, if you dig around in the OS X package you can find the rg binary already installed on your mac:
find /Applications/Visual* | grep bin/rg
Recent articles
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025