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ripgrep vs The Silver Searcher

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When comparing ripgrep vs The Silver Searcher, the Slant community recommends The Silver Searcher for most people. In the question“What are the best command-line tools for searching plain-text data using regular expressions?” The Silver Searcher is ranked 1st while ripgrep is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose The Silver Searcher is:

The Silver Searcher is lightning fast.

Specs

Case-sensitiveYes

Color codingYes

Compressed filesYes

ConfigurationSingle file

File extension filterYes

Filename filterYes

Filetype filterYes

First line filterYes

LicenseMIT/Unlicense

Multi-line patternsYes

Pattern typesFixed strings, Regular expressions

Regular expressionsPerl-compatible (PCRE), Fast non-backtracking

Supported platformsWindows, MacOS, Linux

ThreadedYes

VCS ignore supportYes

Written inRust

No specs yet!

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best command-line tools for searching plain-text data using regular expressions?

Pros

Pro
Fast

ripgrep has performance similar to raw grep but provides similar level of usability as The Silver Searcher or ACK.

Pro
Supports VCS ignore files

ripgrep can speed up by ignoring files matched by pattern in ".rgignore" (deprecated), ".ignore" (since rg-v0.2.0), and VCS ignore files (e.g., currently only ".gitignore").

Pro
Speedy even with Unicode (UTF-8) searches

Pro
Lock-free parallel recursive directory search

Pro
ripgrep lets you only search certain types of files via file type whitelist

Pro
Speed

The Silver Searcher is lightning fast.

Pro
Idiot proof

"ag searchterm" - it's that simple in its purest form.

Pro
Support VCS ignore files

Ag can speed up by ignoring files matched by pattern in ".agignore" (deprecated), ".ignore" (since ag-v0.33.0), and VCS ignore files (.gitignore, .git/info/exclude, .hgignore, svn:ignore).

Pro
Good overview of results

Grouped by file, highlighted with background color, linenumbers by default

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Cons

Con
Does not support encodings other than UTF-8

If you need to search files with text encodings other than UTF-8 (like UTF-16), then ripgrep won’t work. ripgrep will still work on ASCII compatible encodings like latin1 or otherwise partially valid UTF-8. ripgrep may grow support for additional text encodings over time.