ripgrep

ripgrep (rg) searches every file in a folder for a text pattern, like grep, but faster and with smarter defaults. It searches recursively, skips whatever your .gitignore excludes, and ignores hidden and binary files without being told. It's free, dual-licensed MIT or Unlicense, and VS Code ships it for its search.

Install is one command on every major platform: brew install ripgrep, sudo apt-get install ripgrep, winget, cargo. In the author's Linux kernel benchmark it beats git grep, The Silver Searcher, ugrep and ack, and it stays fast with Unicode on, where GNU grep took 32x longer in one of his tests. No paid tier, no cloud, nothing to run. Solo, small teams and larger teams: free, put it on every machine.

The catch: it isn't grep. It doesn't follow POSIX, it isn't preinstalled everywhere, and its flags differ enough to trip muscle memory, so portable scripts should stay on grep. Lookarounds and backreferences need -P for PCRE2. And respect the --pre flag, which runs a program on every file it searches: AnythingLLM shipped a remote code execution bug in 2026 because its AI agent passed patterns to rg without a -- separator. Untrusted input needs that guard.