ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool written in Rust that recursively searches directories for regex patterns while respecting gitignore rules. By default, it automatically skips hidden files, directories, and binary files, though this filtering can be completely disabled with the -uuu flag. The tool provides first-class support across Windows, macOS, and Linux with binary downloads available for every release.
ripgrep is dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE and shares contributors with major projects including Microsoft's VSCode and TypeScript repositories as well as the Rust language repository itself. The tool is similar to other popular search utilities like The Silver Searcher, ack, and grep, but distinguishes itself through performance optimization and sensible defaults for code searching.
The repository's README includes extensive benchmark comparisons demonstrating ripgrep's performance advantages. When searching the Linux kernel source tree for the pattern [A-Z]+_SUSPEND with word boundaries, ripgrep completed in 0.082 seconds, outperforming hypergrep at 0.167 seconds, git grep at 0.273 seconds, and The Silver Searcher at 0.443 seconds. On a 13GB file search, ripgrep achieved 1.042 seconds compared to ugrep's 1.339 seconds and GNU grep's 6.577 seconds. The benchmarks reveal that ripgrep maintains performance advantages across various scenarios, including searches with high match counts where ripgrep returned 83,499,915 matches in 6.948 seconds versus ugrep's 11.721 seconds.
Key features include support for searching specific file types with flags like -tpy for Python files, optional PCRE2 regex engine support via -P or --pcre2 flags for look-around and backreferences, rudimentary replacement functionality, support for multiple text encodings including UTF-16 and GBK, and the ability to search compressed files in formats like gzip, bzip2, and zstandard. The tool supports configuration files, arbitrary input preprocessing filters, and context display around matches.
The repository includes comprehensive documentation through a user guide, frequently asked questions section, and regex syntax documentation. The project acknowledges legitimate reasons not to use ripgrep, including the need for POSIX compliance and portability to systems where ripgrep cannot be installed, though the maintainer encourages bug reports for platform availability issues.
