ripgrep (rg)

ripgrep is a command line search tool that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw speed of GNU grep. ripgrep has first class support on Windows, Mac and Linux, with binary downloads available for every release.

Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.

Screenshot of search results

Quick example comparing tools

This example searches the entire Linux kernel source tree (after running make defconfig && make -j8) for [A-Z]+_SUSPEND, where all matches must be words. Timings were collected on a system with an Intel i7-6900K 3.2 GHz.

Please remember that a single benchmark is never enough! See my blog post on ripgrep for a very detailed comparison with more benchmarks and analysis.

Tool	Command	Line count	Time
ripgrep	rg -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	450	0.245s
The Silver Searcher	ag -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	450	0.753s
git grep	LC_ALL=C git grep -E -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	450	0.823s
git grep	LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 git grep -E -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	450	2.880s
sift	sift --git -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	450	3.656s
The Platinum Searcher	pt -w -e '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	450	12.369s
ack	ack -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'	1878	16.952s

(Yes, ack has a bug.)

Why should I use ripgrep?

• It can replace both The Silver Searcher and GNU grep because it is faster than both. (N.B. It is not, strictly speaking, a "drop-in" replacement for both, but the feature sets are far more similar than different.)
• Like The Silver Searcher, ripgrep defaults to recursive directory search and won't search files ignored by your .gitignore files. It also ignores hidden and binary files by default. ripgrep also implements full support for .gitignore, where as there are many bugs related to that functionality in The Silver Searcher.
• ripgrep can search specific types of files. For example, rg -tpy foo limits your search to Python files and rg -Tjs foo excludes Javascript files from your search. ripgrep can be taught about new file types with custom matching rules.
• ripgrep supports many features found in grep, such as showing the context of search results, searching multiple patterns, highlighting matches with color and full Unicode support. Unlike GNU grep, ripgrep stays fast while supporting Unicode (which is always on).

In other words, use ripgrep if you like speed, sane defaults, fewer bugs and Unicode.

Is it really faster than everything else?

Yes. A large number of benchmarks with detailed analysis for each is available on my blog.

Summarizing, ripgrep is fast because:

• It is built on top of Rust's regex engine. Rust's regex engine uses finite automata, SIMD and aggressive literal optimizations to make searching very fast.
• Rust's regex library maintains performance with full Unicode support by building UTF-8 decoding directly into its deterministic finite automaton engine.
• It supports searching with either memory maps or by searching incrementally with an intermediate buffer. The former is better for single files and the latter is better for large directories. ripgrep chooses the best searching strategy for you automatically.
• Applies your ignore patterns in .gitignore files using a RegexSet. That means a single file path can be matched against multiple glob patterns simultaneously.
• Uses a Chase-Lev work-stealing queue for quickly distributing work to multiple threads.

Installation

The binary name for ripgrep is rg.

Binaries for ripgrep are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Linux binaries are static executables. Windows binaries are available either as built with MinGW (GNU) or with Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC). When possible, prefer MSVC over GNU, but you'll need to have the Microsoft VC++ 2015 redistributable installed.

If you're a Homebrew user, then you can install it with a custom formula (N.B. ripgrep isn't actually in Homebrew yet. This just installs the binary directly):

$ brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/master/pkg/brew/ripgrep.rb

If you're an Archlinux user, then you can install ripgrep from the ripgrep AUR package, e.g.,

$ yaourt -S ripgrep

If you're a Rust programmer, ripgrep can be installed with cargo:

$ cargo install ripgrep

ripgrep isn't currently in any other package repositories. I'd like to change that.

Whirlwind tour

The command line usage of ripgrep doesn't differ much from other tools that perform a similar function, so you probably already know how to use ripgrep. The full details can be found in rg --help, but let's go on a whirlwind tour.

ripgrep detects when its printing to a terminal, and will automatically colorize your output and show line numbers, just like The Silver Searcher. Coloring works on Windows too! Colors can be controlled more granularly with the --color flag.

One last thing before we get started: ripgrep assumes UTF-8 everywhere. It can still search files that are invalid UTF-8 (like, say, latin-1), but it will simply not work on UTF-16 encoded files or other more exotic encodings. Support for other encodings may happen.

To recursively search the current directory, while respecting all .gitignore files, ignore hidden files and directories and skip binary files:

$ rg foobar

The above command also respects all .ignore files, including in parent directories. .ignore files can be used when .gitignore files are insufficient. In all cases, .ignore patterns take precedence over .gitignore.

To ignore all ignore files, use -u. To additionally search hidden files and directories, use -uu. To additionally search binary files, use -uuu. (In other words, "search everything, dammit!") In particular, rg -uuu is similar to grep -a -r.

$ rg -uu foobar  # similar to `grep -r`
$ rg -uuu foobar  # similar to `grep -a -r`

(Tip: If your ignore files aren't being adhered to like you expect, run your search with the --debug flag.)

Make the search case insensitive with -i, invert the search with -v or show the 2 lines before and after every search result with -C2.

Force all matches to be surrounded by word boundaries with -w.

Search and replace (find first and last names and swap them):

$ rg '([A-Z][a-z]+)\s+([A-Z][a-z]+)' --replace '$2, $1'

Named groups are supported:

$ rg '(?P<first>[A-Z][a-z]+)\s+(?P<last>[A-Z][a-z]+)' --replace '$last, $first'

Up the ante with full Unicode support, by matching any uppercase Unicode letter followed by any sequence of lowercase Unicode letters (good luck doing this with other search tools!):

$ rg '(\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+)\s+(\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+)' --replace '$2, $1'

Search only files matching a particular glob:

$ rg foo -g 'README.*'

Or exclude files matching a particular glob:

$ rg foo -g '!*.min.js'

Search only HTML and CSS files:

$ rg -thtml -tcss foobar

Search everything except for Javascript files:

$ rg -Tjs foobar

To see a list of types supported, run rg --type-list. To add a new type, use --type-add:

$ rg --type-add 'foo:*.foo,*.foobar'

The type foo will now match any file ending with the .foo or .foobar extensions.

Regex syntax

The syntax supported is documented as part of Rust's regex library.

Building

ripgrep is written in Rust, so you'll need to grab a Rust installation in order to compile it. ripgrep compiles with Rust 1.9 (stable) or newer. Building is easy:

$ git clone https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
$ cd ripgrep
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/rg --version
0.1.3

If you have a Rust nightly compiler, then you can enable optional SIMD acceleration like so:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release --features simd-accel

Running tests

ripgrep is relatively well tested, including both unit tests and integration tests. To run the full test suite, use:

$ cargo test

from the repository root.