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ripgrep vs Mutt

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When comparing ripgrep vs Mutt, the Slant community recommends ripgrep for most people. In the question“What are the best shell powertools?” ripgrep is ranked 3rd while Mutt is ranked 12th. 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

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

Supported platformsWindows, MacOS, Linux

ThreadedYes

VCS ignore supportYes

Written inRust

LicenseGPLv2+

PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux

SearchYes

TechnologyC

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best shell powertools?

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
Terminal based

Pro
Small and efficient

Pro
Active development

Even though it was first released in 1995, Mutt still enjoys an active community following it and having new releases constantly.

Pro
It runs inside the terminal

It doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements.

Pro
Compose mails in your favorite editor

Edit mails efficiently with an editor you already can work fluently with.

Pro
Highly configurable macros

Pro
Threads emails

Pro
Work with regular expressions

Mails can be filtered, deleted, flagged, etc. with regular expressions which makes mail management very efficient.

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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.