This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a complete list of the tools in this series in the Summary section.
There are two main grepping utility-families: grep and ack. The former is for the plain searching and is ubiquitous. The latter offers smart searching, meaning it knows what files should be filtered out. ripgrep is a hybrid solution that recursively searches your current directory for a regex pattern. By default, ripgrep will respect your .gitignore and automatically skips hidden files/directories and binary files.
ripgrep is written in the Rust programming language. If you are interested in learning Rust, check our our recommended free Rust books.
Installation
Let’s clone the project’s repository, compile, and install the system with a few simple commands:
$ cd ripgrep
$ cargo install ripgrep
Cargo is the Rust package manager. It makes it easy to get up and running by downloading a Rust project’s dependencies, compiling the project, making packages, and more.
You’ll need to ensure ~/.cargo/bin is in your PATH. The variable $PATH is set by your shell every time it launches, but you can set it so that it always includes your new path with every new shell you open. The exact way to do this depends on which shell you’re running.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |
To get the recursively search with the standard grep is just add -r, if you want colorized output then add –color and with zgrep you have support for xz, lzma, bzip2, and gzip compressed files.
It’s great to see that people still keeps on inventing the wheel…