When comparing ripgrep vs cmus, the Slant community recommends ripgrep for most people. In the question“What are the best shell powertools?” ripgrep is ranked 3rd while cmus is ranked 8th. 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 CLI only
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Pro Does not use a lot of memory
Cmus only uses about 15 MB. This is a very small and light media player, which is ideal for people with low end hardware.
Pro Works very well with tags from MusicBrainz database
cmus will factor in additional data from the MusicBrainz database while sorting. For example sort orders for arist or album, and the original release date for an album (in the case of a re-release).
Pro Good library structure
A lot of music players may act more like playlist viewers rather than a music library. cmus sorts by Artist > Year > Album.
Pro Fast
A lot of music players will be slow when starting if they have huge libraries, but CMus starts fast no matter the library size.
Pro Customizable keybindings for a personal experience
You can add keybindings for just about anything - including seeking (forward/backwards 1 minute, for example) which isn't supported by all music players.
Pro No mouse required
cmus does not require a mouse as it runs in the terminal
Pro Open source extensions and scripts
On GitHub you can find the official WIKI where there are a dozen extensions and scripts from color themes to a lyrics viewer and the ability to play YouTube songs.
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 No album art
cmus does not display album art
Con CLI only
No graphical interface is available for cmus. Everything is done through CLI (command line interface).
Con Difficult to use
Cmus uses odd keyboard shortcuts such as "C" to pause, "E" to add songs to queue, and "4" to edit the queue.