curious

[callowaylc]

Hey, just wanted to see if anyone is actually seriously replacing grep, a cornerstone tool, first released in the 70s and available, you know, everywhere, with a tool that hasnt been dev'd for 4 years.

Lol, I hear that nodejs has a module that encapsulate rm -rf, named rmrf; oh man, good times.

[drichardson]

Grep is relatively slow. It doesn't matter if you're searching a small directory, but it adds up on large projects. There are a lot of comparisons of the various tools, but I just happened to do one that includes sift because I was trying it out:

https://github.com/drichardson/CodeSearchShootout

That said, I do agree with your point that replacing grep with sift, in particular, may be a bad idea since this project seems to be dead. Ripgrep is similar in performance to Sift, but is actively maintained and has many contributors.

[BurntSushi]

@drichardson Just a quick note: sift won't respect your .gitignore files by default, where as ripgrep will. If you pass --git to sift (or --no-ignore to ripgrep), then your comparison should be a bit more fair. :-) Nice work otherwise!

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of ripgrep.)

[drichardson]

@drichardson Just a quick note: sift won't respect your .gitignore files by default, where as ripgrep will. If you pass --git to sift (or --no-ignore to ripgrep), then your comparison should be a bit more fair. :-) Nice work otherwise!

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of ripgrep.)

Thanks, tests updated.