# ripgrep 122 Hacker News commenters recommended ripgrep and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A much faster grep replacement for searching codebases, also widely used by AI coding agents; the main caveat is its default skipping of gitignored and hidden files. ## Why people recommend it - Much faster than grep (8 comments): "it makes searching for text inside the current folder so much easier and it is insanely faster" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990647)) "Ripgrep is much faster than grep. But the result is not more concise and tokens are wasted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670333)) "runs async and finishes more or less before my "emacs pinkie" is ready to touch another key" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46059138)) - Great search tool for AI agents (6 comments): "The agents do just fine using ripgrep and calling cargo clippy, dart analyze, ty check, etc. themselves." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295884)) "You can give your agent ripgrep and let it figure out how to find the right results all on its own." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536431)) "rg is the number one most important part that enables LLMs to be smart agents in a codebase" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500650)) - Easy install, few dependencies (3 comments): "`cd ripgrep; cargo install --path .` or `cargo install ripgrep` usually just work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900845)) "From my daily-use utilities, ripgrep and bat seem to have zero dependencies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46369752)) "You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793929)) - Integrates well with editors (3 comments): "runs async and finishes more or less before my "emacs pinkie" is ready to touch another key" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46059138)) "I see the future where I'm faster with Neovim and ripgrep than Codex" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913543)) "ivy/avy/counsel/swiper with ripgrep (thanks burntsushi ) integration" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48127529)) ## What people warn about - Confusing default ignore rules (7 comments): "in non-git repos, .gitignore rules are silently ignored because rg doesn't pass --no-require-git by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510646)) "too many things get ignored and I can't be bothered to figure out how to configure it more cleanly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504976)) "Using another tool's config by default, making it difficult/impossible to use the dedicated config is the most annoying thing I can imagine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502924)) - Flags differ from grep (3 comments): "He keeps using -r with ripgrep thinking that means recursive, when actually that's a replacement instruction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445022)) "Going from ag to ripgrep is not unequivocally better. Sure ripgrep is faster, but its file filtering using -g is so much more cumbersome than -G in ag." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49729710)) "incompatible with grep syntax, which makes it useless to most system admins" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502671)) - Heavy CPU usage when multithreaded (2 comments): "ripgrep is inefficient in CPU usage when runs multithreaded and uses about 2x times more CPU time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510610)) "it happily used all of my cpu cores scanning files, made me unable to do anything for awhile" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502159)) - Occasional missing or truncated results (3 comments): "I experienced a data truncation issue where I ran an rg -zF fixed string search piped into another rg -F." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511438)) "I still use it but Ive never trusted it fully since then I double check." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500683)) "rg x would show nothing but grep -r x showed the lines for any x" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500731)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [ast-grep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ast-grep.md): 21 recommend - [Semble](https://hackerapproved.com/p/semble.md): 20 recommend - [Graft (Claude Code hooks)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/graft.md): 13 recommend - [Lat.md](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lat-md.md): 11 recommend - [Ory Lumen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lumen.md): 10 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "ripgrep", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ripgrep/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).