ripgrep

ripgrep (also known as rg) is an extremely fast alternative to tools like grep, ag, and ack. It combines the raw speed of ag with the correctness of GNU grep, while automatically respecting .gitignore rules and skipping hidden or binary files by default.

Features

• Blazing fast — consistently outperforms other search tools in benchmarks
• Regex support — full Perl-compatible regular expressions via the regex crate
• Respects .gitignore — skips ignored, hidden, and binary files automatically
• Unicode-aware — searches UTF-8, UTF-16, and other encodings
• Colored output — highlights matches with terminal colors out of the box
• Multiline search — can match patterns that span multiple lines

Installation

cargo install ripgrep

Or via your system package manager:

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt install ripgrep

# macOS
brew install ripgrep

Usage

# Search for a pattern recursively in the current directory
rg "fn main"

# Search only in Rust files
rg "fn main" --type rust

# Case-insensitive search
rg -i "error"

# Show context lines around matches
rg -C 3 "TODO"

# Search for a fixed string (no regex)
rg -F "some.literal.string"