[dmlerner]

Why not ripgrep?

[GuB-42]

Why not ugrep?

They are more or less equivalent. One has obscure feature X other has obscure feature Y, one is a bit faster on A, other is a bit faster on B, the defaults are a bit different, and one is written in Rust, the other in C++.

Pick the one you like, or both. I have both on my machine, and tend to use the one that does what I want with the least options. I also use GNU grep when I don't need the speed or features of either ug and rg.

[tredre3]

One thing I never liked about ripgrep is that it doesn't have a pager. Yes, it can be configured to use the system-wide ones, but it's an extra step (and every time I have to google how to preserve colors) and on Windows you're SOL unless you install gnu utils or something. The author always refused to fix that.

Ugrep not only has a pager built in, but it also allows searching the results which is super nice! And that feature works on all supported platforms!

[bornfreddy]

Interesting - for me a built-in pager is an antifeature. I don't want to figure out how to leave the utility. Worst of all, pager usually means that sometimes you get more pages and you need to press q to exit, and sometimes not. Annoying. I often type yhe next command right away and the pager means I get stuck, or worse, pager starts doing something in response to my keys (looking at you, `git log`).

Then again I'm on Linux and can always pipe to less if I need to. I'm also not the target audience for ugrep because I've never noticed that grep would be slow. :shrug:

[burntsushi]

This is what I do personally:

    $ cat ~/bin/rgp
    #!/bin/sh
    exec rg -p "$@" | less -RFX

Should work just fine. For Windows, you can install `bat` to use a pager if you don't otherwise have one. You don't need GNU utils to have a pager.

[MrDrMcCoy]

For me, it's a lot easier to compile a static binary of a C++ app than a Rust one. Never got that to work. Also nice to have compatibility with all of grep's arguments.

[datadeft]

> to compile a static binary

Cargo is one of the main reasons to use Rust of C++. I am pretty sure there is more involved with C++ than this:

   rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl 
   cargo build --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

[devraza]

From the ugrep README:

For an up-to-date performance comparison of the latest ugrep, please see the ugrep performance benchmarks [at https://github.com/Genivia/ugrep-benchmarks]. Ugrep is faster than GNU grep, Silver Searcher, ack, sift. Ugrep's speed beats ripgrep in most benchmarks.

[codetrotter]

Does these performance comparison take into account the things BurntSushi (ripgrep author) pointed out in the ripgrep issue link elsewhere ITT? https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions/2597

Either way, ripgrep is awesome and I’m staying with it.

[Conscat]

The best practical reason to choose this is its interactive features, like regexp building.

[philkrylov]

Although being faster in some cases, ripgrep lacks archive search support (no, transparent decompression ignoring the archive structure is not enough) which works great in ugrep.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

I assume the grep compatible bit is attractive to some people. Not me, but they exist.

[derriz]

I find myself returning to grep from my default of rg because I'm just too lazy to learn a new regex language. Stuff like word boundaries "\<word\>" or multiple patterns "\(one\|two\)".

[jedisct1]

Fuzzy matching is the main reason I switched to ugrep. This is insanely useful.

[meindnoch]

Because this is faster?

[bsdpufferfish]

ripgrep stole the name but doesn’t follow the posix standard.