[harry8]

Seems this comment was a bit subtle for some people.

Moving to a different set of quirks is not a step forward than continuing to use the ones you know. Regexes aren't de-facto standard; grep is different to egrep to perl to python to C++ to your text editor to whatever. It's a massive pain and annoying as fudge. You're a programmer you know this. A "superior" set of quirks may be better for new regex users but it is worse for everyone else who now has to know both grep (and all the other regex quirks) and ripgrep if they're going to use it. To get this done like I always have I now need to know something new. A new user doesn't care about the obsolete.

Faster? Well I have not yet experienced an issue with the speed of grep, that's my experience. I can imagine this could be compelling for uses I don't know about.

ripgrep may well be a better grep for some users. And that is Great, really! We should all try and make things better! Hurrah!

Refusing to describe how it is different and why you might like to install something non-standard (for which there could be compelling reasons) is just silly. Hyping anything at all in that context like that looks pretty bad.

The ratio of content-free hype (omg ripgrep is fantistic!) to an actual description on this thread or in the link or seemingly anywhere I clicked is pretty bad and constitutes a signal.

[burntsushi]

It sounds like you looked everywhere except for ripgrep's README. It explains upsides and downsides. Has benchmarks (with links to more, including cases where grep takes minutes and ripgrep takes seconds). It also has a link to a FAQ addressing whether ripgrep can replace grep and explains a bit more context.

More to the point, the comment you were responding to said "yeah but with less quirks." It didn't say "no" quirks. So your comment ended up being a silly non-sequitur.

Your follow-up comment looks ever worse to be honest, and sounds like an argument for never building anything different at all.

And half your comment is whinging about hype. Really? Yeah people get excited about shit that helps them get stuff done more pleasantly and faster than before. Who would have thunk it. Some great mystery.

Your comments get a big thumbs down from me (author of ripgrep).

[harry8]

Thanks for your response.

Readme was not linked here. I looked and didn't find it in the parent link. Feel free to abuse my competence or, you know, link it in the discussion? Actually I'll do it.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/README.md

There. That feels better doesn't it?

More quirks you have to learn is not less.

You know 5 quirks.

This new thing has 3 /different/ quirks to perform the same task you already know.

To use the thing with "less" quirks you need to know _more_ quirks. And that can be fine! Or you might decide it as not worthwhile. But it is more quirks you gotta learn. Pointing that out is not a non-sequitur to a discussion that starts with:

>So it's grep like i already have installed and know its quirks?

"Yes, and it's faster if you need that and its ui makes more sense to me." Is an appropriate addendum.

Less quirks means you gotta learn more. And that is just life for all of us and one of the barriers that protects incumbents that are in some sense not as good. Note my selfish comment was taking my perspective that I already have grep and I already use it and know its quirks.

From your readme:

>You need a portable and ubiquitous tool. While ripgrep works on Windows, macOS and Linux, it is not ubiquitous and it does not conform to any standard such as POSIX. The best tool for this job is good old grep.

So you see how if you have to know grep anyway, less quirks isn't a great thing in and of itself to the user. Simpler to use interface, yeah that could be compelling. Or not. Faster could be compelling. Or not. Some additional feature could be compelling.

Maybe ripgrep is amazing and the future and just dandy and I wish you the best of luck with everything you want to achieve with your version of grep.

--------

>Your follow-up comment looks ever worse to be honest, and sounds like an argument for never building anything different at all

That's basically pretty rude and difficult to reconcile with what I actually said.

>ripgrep may well be a better grep for some users. And that is Great, really! We should all try and make things better! Hurrah!

Q. What is ripgrep?

A. A faster grep where some people find the defaults in the interface more usable, with some potentially interesting additional features.

What a lot of words wasted to get to that Q & A. Please feel free to improve it while maintaining that length. Signal to noise.

[burntsushi]

Bud, this was the extent of your exchange that was apparently "too subtle" for all us dumbfucks to understand:

    >>> So it's grep like i already have installed and know its quirks?
    >> yeah but with less quirks and runs much faster. worth trying out
    > Uses regexes = has quirks.

So you start off with a passive aggressive nose snubbing. Someone comes in and spends exactly as much time on you as you deserve, and describes ripgrep in their own words by saying it has "less quirks." And indeed, a lot of people experience that precisely because ripgrep uses heuristics to reduce false positives in search results. Many folks experience that as "less quirks." You might not and many others might not, but that ain't their problem.

Then you respond with "uses regex = has quirks," as if the parent said "ripgrep has no quirks." Well, no shit sherlock, any grep is going to have regex support and any grep is going to have the quirks that come with regexes. That doesn't mean what the parent poster said was incorrect and it certainly doesn't mean the parent poster implied ripgrep had zero quirks. Your comment was a refutation of a silly straw man.

Real subtle, I know.

> Readme was not linked here. I looked and didn't find it in the parent link. Feel free to abuse my competence or, you know, link it in the discussion? Actually I'll do it.

If this was a link to a blog post about ripgrep or a release announcement or something of that sort, yeah, absolutely, the author should have given ripgrep at least a short introduction and a link to the README. But this is just a link pointing out a typo-squatted crate meant to improve failure modes. It's a "hey here's something interesting." It isn't even interesting just because of ripgrep, it's interesting because some person cared enough to try and improve failure modes and prevent someone from installing the wrong thing. If you want to know what ripgrep is from there, it's on you to go figure it out. It isn't on your fellow HN commenters. They explained what it was in their own words and you didn't like it. And now you've spent who knows how much time here whinging about "herp derp hype and but but but signal-to-noise" when it would have taken you less than 5 seconds to Google the damn word and click on the first result.

> A faster grep where some people find the defaults in the interface more usable, with some potentially interesting additional features.

LOL. This is a terrible description. ripgrep's official description is shorter and far more useful, because it gives you an idea of what it's actually doing, instead of just vaguely talking about it:

> ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

Bottom line is:

* You made silly snobbish comments.

* The rest of your whinging could have been mitigated by a 5 second Google search. Yes, normally, for things like release announcements[1], I include a short blurb about what ripgrep is. But this wasn't a release announcement. You want the official answer? Then go look for it. You want the (possibly described in terms of their own experience) opinion of your HN peers? Well, that's what you got. Live with it.

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/releases/tag/13.0.0

[harry8]

> ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

so (i) grep with the -r flag by default and (ii) has the feature of reading your .gitignore when present which is potentially interesting. But yours is still a better answer than "searches for stuff" and the many other answers here where nodobdy was saying /why/ they liked it. The tenor of that conversation on this site was the objection and remains so.

You seem to be taking this very personally and indulging in a bit of flaming of a kind @dang doesn't care for. I don't mind though. Yet again I say good luck to you.