ripgrep

ripgrep (rg) is grep but 10x faster and actually pleasant to use. It respects .gitignore by default, searches recursively, uses Rust's regex engine, and outputs with color and context. Once you use it, regular grep feels broken.

GNU grep is the universal baseline — everywhere, but slow on large codebases. ag (The Silver Searcher) was the first fast grep alternative but ripgrep surpassed it. For commercial, nothing — ripgrep is the standard now. IDE search uses it under the hood (VS Code, Zed both use ripgrep).

Install it. No qualifiers. If you touch a terminal, rg should be aliased and ready. It's faster than every alternative in virtually every benchmark, handles Unicode correctly, and the flag interface is intuitive. Unlicense means it's as free as software gets.

The catch: there genuinely isn't a significant one. If pressed: it doesn't support multiline matching as elegantly as some alternatives, and the --pcre2 flag for lookaheads requires an optional dependency. That's about it. ripgrep is one of the rare tools that's just better.