When comparing ripgrep vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends ripgrep for most people. In the question“What are the most useful applications/utilities written in Rust?” ripgrep is ranked 1st while Alacritty is ranked 2nd. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated
Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there.
Pro Looks good
Alacritty looks very slick on Linux, especially with GNOME or i3.
Pro Simple configuration
The configuration file is very well made and easy to use. You can fine tune your preferences to perfection in a matter of minutes.
Pro Comprehensive font options
Alacritty can be configured to adjust line spacing (height), letter spacing (width), and individual character horizontal/vertical positions.
Pro Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger
Pro Has text ref-low when window is resized
Pro Fast and simple but with true color support
It's simple and fast like xterm or urxvt but with truecolor support which is a big plus if you use a terminal based code editor. Basically Alacritty has all the features you need and nothing you don't (if you're using tmux for multiplexing).
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 Cannot into ligatures
Alacritty does not support ligatures in Fira Code, Iosevka etc.
Con Unreliable Font Rendering
Like a box of chocolate you never know what you're going to get.
Con Sacrifices basic features for raw performance
The Suzuki GSXR of terminals. Or your ditzy, blonde high school cheerleader; fast and pretty but not a lot going on under the hood.
Eschews a negative developmental philosophy towards including said functionality, with the official reason cited in project documentation as "Not within the realm of a terminal emulator" and ostensibly, "best left up to other tools such as terminal multiplexers" [such as screen or tmux]. Which is unfortunate when you factor in speed against terminal with the functionality built in vs their reliance on 3rd party tools:
tmux on alacritty: 'find /usr' time: 3.234s, cpu: 72%
tmux on konsole: find /usr' time: 1.777s, cpu: 96%
See issue here.