RIPgrep is written in Rust, so that means that it's faster, safer, and bug-free.
rg can be useful in some situations, e.g. obscenely large files, but it is definitely overhyped and a good example of why rust shills will never be real programmers. The only people who think rg is better either don't know how to use the tools that already exist, or are doing something very wrong.
- grep is a standard, not a specific implementation; rg is not a grep and has no business having grep in the name
- tools do not exist in isolation which is why specifications (and conformance) are important; I can't (easily) integreate rg into my toolset so it is less valuable, even if it were faster
- the multi-threading etc. has a "warm up" time so it's actually slower for "small" use cases (which is almost everything that I've tried it for)
- "it it has better defaults" ? alias
- "it reads .gitignore" ? git grep
- "it has full unicode support" ? no it doesn't
- "but I have six gorillion niggabytes of code in a mixed language repo and I need to search all files of one specific language only but they're all over the place and I don't believe in file extensions so I have to search by mime-type" ? ngmi