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ripgrep vs The Platinum Searcher (pt)

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When comparing ripgrep vs The Platinum Searcher (pt), 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 The Platinum Searcher (pt) is ranked 10th. 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

LicenseMIT/Unlicense

Supported platformsWindows, MacOS, Linux

Case-sensitiveYes

Color codingYes

Compressed filesYes

ConfigurationSingle file

File extension filterYes

Filename filterYes

Filetype filterYes

First line filterYes

Multi-line patternsYes

Pattern typesFixed strings, Regular expressions

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

ThreadedYes

VCS ignore supportYes

Written inRust

LicenseMIT

Supported platformsLinux, macOS, Windows

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
Works with Atom

Pro
Fully configurable

Can define specific configuration in each directory using .ptconfig.toml.

Pro
Golang

Writing fully in Go.

Pro
Very fast

3–5× faster than ack. Slightly faster than ag.

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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.