The optional Google search syntax also very convenient.
Ugrep has that. In my case, I’m working with zipped corpora of millions of small text files, so I can skip unpacking the whole thing to the filesystem (certain filesystems have trouble at this scale).
I’m grateful for both tools. Thanks to the respective authors!
So weird. I mean, it's just about some open source tool, right? :-/
There are feuds about open source tools all the time. Text editors, Linux distros, shells, programming languages, desktop environments, etc... And ugrep vs ripgrep may be a poster child for C++ vs Rust.
It is not all bad, it drives progress, and it usually stays at a technical level, I've yet to see people killing each others for their choice of command line search tool.
> ugrep is easily one of the if not most featureful grep programs in existence. And it is also fast.
which is burntsushi, ripgrep's author, defending ugrep from someone saying they only focus on performance at the cost of features.
‡ The main commercial product of the ugrep author's company at the time was the gSOAP code generator (it may still be), and that it not only works but makes a reasonably good C and C++ API from WSDL is proof that it is the product of a genius madman. It also allowed you to create both the API and WSDL from a C++-ish header, and both .NET and Java WSDL tools worked perfectly with it. We needed it to work and work it did.
At the time, the generated API was just difficult enough to use that I generated another ~1k lines of code for that project. IIRC, the generated API is sort of handle-based, which requires a slightly different approach than the strict RAII approach we were using. Generating that code was a minor adventure (generating the gSOAP code from the header-ish file, generating doxygen XML from the generated gSOAP code, then generating the wrapper C++ from the doxygen XML).
I think the killer feature is compatibility with existing grep command line switches. Not needing to learn a whole new set of options is quite nice.