ripgrep, three years in

write-uptools · 29 points · 9 comments

Things I did not expect to matter and do: it respects the ignore file by default, so a search in a repo is a search in the source; it prints the file once and the lines under it, which is the shape you actually read; and it is fast enough that you stop planning searches and just search.

The last one changed how I work more than the speed did.

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9 comments

2026-10-14
Filed under things I will rediscover in eighteen months and be annoyed about.
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2026-10-14
The naming point generalises. Half our bugs are a name answering a different question than its value.
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2026-10-14
Is there a version of this that works when the window is not fixed?
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2026-10-14
Yes, but it costs a second index and I would not do it under a million rows.
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2026-10-14
I disagree with the framing but not the conclusion, which is an odd place to end up.
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2026-10-14
Small correction: it is the fifth most recent, not the fifth oldest. Took me a minute.
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2026-10-14
Fixed, thank you. That was a real error and not a typo.
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2026-10-14
This is the one I was looking for last week. Thank you.
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2026-10-14
Worth adding that this only holds if the clock is monotonic. Ours was not, and the failure looked exactly like a slow disk.
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