Could you please let me know how you came to that understanding? Because I'd really like to fix it. ripgrep was never intended to be POSIX compatible. It would have been a straight-jacket over its functionality. See: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#pos...
> As for RG and AG. other than being faster, how are they better?
For ripgrep at least, a lot of it comes down to speed, better output formatting by default and suppressing results you probably don't want by default (but that can be turned off quite easily).
But there are other features, like better Unicode support, built-in support for searching compressed files, support for file types and a few other things. The README includes a bit more. ;-)
I have actually read a few of your (great) articles about ripgrep. I hope I didn’t come off as dismissive of your impressive work - though rereading my comment I should perhaps have chosen my wordS a bit more thoughtfully.
I did know that RG would skip more files than normal grep, so I guess I knew it’s not a safe replacement for all shell scripts.
But other than that, I’ve never thought of AG or RG as tools that brings something new to the table. I’ve always thought of them as a drop ins, with slightly new defaults and much faster speed. And the discussion related to TFA is tools that are missing, not tools that are better.
Maybe it’s a mix of the name and countess blog posts telling readers to use RG instead of GREP, that lead me to consider RG as a better grep and not a different tool.
To grep? Not that I know, I don't think either respects POSIX grep to say nothing of GNU grep. Though the trivial usage is identical, and many basic options carry over (e.g. -C and friends).
> other than being faster, how are they better?
Way better defaults for one. `rg` defaults to being recursive, ignoring binary files, respecting various types of ignore files, not being limited to BREs, coloring, …
They also have useful convenience features like "file categories" (e.g. `-t` will expand to a bunch of predefined include glob patterns so you don't have to input them by hand, which can be tedious), or parallelism (recursive ripgrep will parallelise searches across files, with grep you have to remember to combine `find`, `xargs -P` and `grep` for that to happen).
Why is bat better than less?
I admit to catting files for reading as much as the next guy, but I almost always have the tiniest regret that I didn’t feed it into less and kept my terminal cleaner.
As for RG and AG. other than being faster, how are they better? I thought they were api complainant drop-in replacements so it’s not like they fill in a missing role.