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Add to SafariWhen comparing ripgrep vs Byobu, the Slant community recommends ripgrep for most people. In the question“What are the best shell powertools?” ripgrep is ranked 3rd while Byobu is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose ripgrep is:
ripgrep has performance similar to raw grep but provides similar level of usability as The Silver Searcher or ACK.
Specs
Question Ranking
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 Easy to get started
All of byobu's functionality is conveniently mapped to F1 to F12. It has a help menu to see keybindings and offers window tabs in an easy to interpret format. All this makes it easy to get started (can get in the way of power users, though).
Pro Abstracts tmux and screen with a single user interface.
Pro apt-get or yum install byobu
If neither tmux nor screen are already installed, installs tmux. Both screen and tmux can be installled at same time. Switch between either easily.
Pro Adds OS dashboard alerts
byobu has support for OS alerts when an event happens.
Pro Basic package in Ubuntu Server
Byobu package is part of the basic packages in Ubuntu Server distributions.
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.
Con Does not support decompression
If you need to search compressed files, ripgrep doesn’t try to do any decompression before searching.
Con Does not support arbitrary lookahead/lookbehind assertions
However, it's supported since ripgrep v0.10.0 (2018-09-07)
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#0100-2018-09-07
Con Does not support backreferences
However, it's supported since ripgrep v0.10.0 (2018-09-07)
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#0100-2018-09-07
Con Can't be used as login shell
The byobu abstraction layers don't pass the parameters on to tmux or screen that indicate that they should run as a login shell. This means that you can't run 'ssh -t hostname byobu'. You need to use 'ssh -t hostname bash -l -c byobu'. A second implication is that the inner shell won't know to read the .profile file instead of the .$SHELLrc file. I know of no workaround for this.
Con Comparatively heavy
byobu adds a lot of functionality to the default tmux display. Most of that can't be implemented using the internal variables tmux provides, but requires executing external scripts.
This must be done on every update of the status bar, which happens once a second. That means that the system is performing a lot of forks and interpreting a lot of scripts for this "thin shell wrapper".
Con Adds only a relatively superficial abstraction on tmux or screen
Byobu still uses GNU Screen or tmux as the backend, so from a usability perspective it doesn't add much in terms of new functionalities, instead it only adds a layer of abstraction on top of them.
