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Comment by john-tells-all | Hacker News Reader

I adore Ripgrep and use it dozens of times a day, and have for years. It's extremely fast, does the right thing most of the time, and has a useful featureset.

Ack is also nice, I've used that quite a bit too. It has the advantage of being in Perl, so if you're on a "secure" computer (no compiler), you can still use a fast + featureful search tool.

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I'm glad you appreciate that you can install ack anywhere. It's exactly for that use case that I have kept ack able to be a single text file download. Also, it only requires Perl 5.10.1, so it's OK if you're using an old Perl.

Hmm — there is a project that allows you to compile a single binary that is cross platform across Linux, Mac and Windows. Wondering if ripgrep can be compiled in such a way and that would make it very close to the portability you have with ack.

That still might run afoul of locked down networks like I've seen at banks. Users couldn't install any binaries at all, but with something like ack it's just cut & paste some text into a text file. ack can literally be a select-all, Ctrl-C, switch windows, "cat > ack", Ctrl-V.

I feel the same way about ripgrep, and also fzf - especially both in combination. I only started using them both a few months ago, yet it feels like a fundamental way of doing computing.

fzf is wonderful. I feel like we're only scratching the surface of its utility. Using it with git add is so fast, just "ga" (an alias), hit tab (for each file) then enter.

I find interactive git add more useful most of the time, 'git add -i' then select what's needed from the menu

Figuring out how to integrate that with FZF would be really something. Being able to easily go up and down the list, and visualize the whole thing, would make things a lot smoother.

Any examples of using them in combination? I've only recently started using ripgrep despite being aware of it for a while.

There are a ton of articles out there about it:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ripgrep+%2B+fzf

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