ripgrep (rg) vs grep

What is ripgrep?

ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool written in Rust, built to do the same job as grep but faster and with better defaults for working inside a codebase.

rg -i -n "TODO" ./

That’s it. No flags needed to search recursively (if using grep, we need to explicit the -r flag), and it already skips the stuff you almost never want to search.

The main differences

1. Recursive by default

With grep you need -r to search a whole directory:

grep -r "TODO" .

With rg, recursive is the default behavior:

rg "TODO"

2. Follow .gitignore rule automatically

grep -r will search inside node_modules, .git, build artifacts, everything. rg reads your .gitignore (and .ignore) files and skips all of that automatically:

rg "TODO"          # skips node_modules, .git, dist, etc.
grep -r "TODO" .    # searches everything, including junk

If you actually want to search ignored files too, you can force it:

rg -uu "TODO"

3. Speed

rg is built on Rust’s regex engine with automatic parallelism and smart filtering (skipping binary files, ignored files, etc.), so on large repos it’s much more faster than a plain grep -r.

4. Better output by default

Line numbers, colored matches, and grouping by file all come out of the box with rg:

rg "TODO"
src/main.rs
12: // TODO: handle error case
45: // TODO: refactor this later

With grep you’d need to add -n and --color yourself.

Quick install

# debian/ubuntu
sudo apt install ripgrep