Here’s the Deal

ripgrep vs Nirw Search

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When comparing ripgrep vs Nirw Search, the Slant community recommends ripgrep for most people. In the question“What are the best open source tools for searching source code?” ripgrep is ranked 2nd while Nirw Search is ranked 11th. 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

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 open source tools for searching source code?

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
Progress Output

By default, display the file being searched.

Pro
Optional multi-line support

Pro
Color highlight matches

Pro
Tab completion

The command-line for refining a search supports auto-completing based on the current output.

Pro
Can refine the initial search

Initial search can be refined by typing in other terms (optionally exclude from results too).

Pro
Optional regex or literal text searches

While regex is default, sometimes escaping is inconvenient, in these cases you can perform literal searches.

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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.