[burntsushi]

Just because I built ripgrep doesn't mean I've reinvented a wheel without understanding the existing model/power, so your criticism feels a bit disingenuous to me.

To be clear, with the current release of ripgrep, you cannot create structured objects from its output as easily as you might think. I get that it's fun to show how to do it with long shell pipelines for simple cases, but the current release of ripgrep would actually require you to parse color escape sequences in order to find all of the match boundaries in each line. This is what tools like VS Code do, for example. The --json output format rectifies that. There are other solutions that might be closer to the text format, but they're just more contortions on the line oriented output format that aren't clearly useful for human consumption, and it's much simpler to just give people what they want: JSON.

[needlepont]

Wasn't referring specifically to you.. but to the gist of the article and the post previous to yours I believe. On the ansi escape sequences to find matches, etc...yes, I get what your tool does but having to tokenize against ansi escape codes and other ad-hoc env artifacts is something I'm glad to leave to authors that enjoy it...not that it is terribly difficult unless you decide to reinvent the wheel and optimize everything.