Haven't tried ripgrep before but finally installed. It is noticeably faster than older tools and more importantly the CLI ergonomics is much better! Thanks!
I love Rust, but I love and recommend ripgrep because of its usefulness, reliability and robustness, not because of the language it's written in.
I haven't looked into all the tools in that list, but I would not for example recommend exa over ls as it is simply not reliable enough: if a filename ends in a space, you won't see that in exa, and that bug has been reported for years. To me that is a clear blocker, and if it is still there, I simply cannot trust the file listing from exa, no matter how pretty it may look.
Static linking goes a long way to making Rust worth considering when choosing tools.
Anecdote: I once had to recover a system with a corrupted libpcre.so. This will break almost every standard gnutil. The easiest way to do it without a recovery OS was to use a few alternatives written in Rust, which don't have this problem because they statically link their dependencies (and cargo still worked, so it was easy to install them).
Your anecdote is amusing, but I hope you’re not using it as an example to support your claim that Rust’s static linking should be considered when choosing tools.
Here's a hopefully more exhaustive list that isn't restricted to Rust: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix, meaning it can include other awesome tools like fzf (written in Go).
If you like fzf, give skim [1] a go. It's basically faster (anecdotally) fzf, but can also be used as a Rust library. I made a little personal to-do manager using it, together with SQLite for persistence. I also improved my fish shell ergonomics with [2].
Maybe in Rust. xsv does predate ripgrep though. Maybe ripgrep was the first one to get really popular though. To be honest, I dunno.
With that said, Go tools were doing this before Rust even hit 1.0 as far as I remember. There was 'sift' and 'pt' for "smarter" greps for example, although I don't think either of them ever fully matured.
