Wow, ripgrep is *fast*

#1

I know I'm late to the party here, but this is essentially what happened: I saw people kept mentioning that ripgrep is fast, and in my mind I thought "It's just a tool for scanning a directory tree for matches, it may be faster if one benchmarks it, but just using find and grep is fast enough that the difference won't really be noticeable.".

I have a quirk where I don't like getting used to tools that aren't available on all platforms (or are native tools), because I don't want to become a crank who refuses to work on a computer before having spent half a day setting up Just The Right Terminal Colors(tm).

Anyway, it occurred to me that ripgrep would actually improve matters from that perspective since I don't have find and grep on Windows, but I do have rust/cargo on all platforms nowadays, so I gave it a try .. and holy heck; this thing really is fast.

Seriously, for anyone who has ripgrep on their "I'll try it later, maybe its fine", I really recommend you try it.

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#2

Yeah, I just installed it recently and it's a boon for working on rustc. Thanks @BurntSushi :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#3

On my Windows PC at work I used to always run cargo install ripgrep fd-find tokei as a bare minimum. fd is an implementation of find, and tokei is kinda like the cloc Perl script for counting lines of code, except it feels a couple orders of magnitude faster.

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#4

Yup. Just yesterday I did a rg search and was surprised to see it wasn't done when my hand left the enter key. It actually took 20 seconds! My error: I had run it in my home directory (300 Gb of countless checked out project in various languages plus music, photos, ebooks etc) instead of in my project directory.

Switching back to the project directory (still 5Gb in 725 directories counting only src and test (not target)) (yes I have a lot of auto-generated but source controlled tests in that project), I'm back at the "well below 100 ms" I've come to expect since I started using rg.

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#6

I heard before that ripgrep was fast but I didn’t bother to install.

After reading your post, I thought. Well maybe I should give a try.
And wow! The first impression is: it cannot be that fast!

Good example of why to use Rust

#7

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