Try https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep – it’s across the board better, and one of the best personal productivity boosts you can make if you use grep frequently.

> Not that I have any faith in modern "best practices". I'm imagining `grep` written in modern a modern language like JS and I shutter when I think of the hundreds of micro-dependencies like "left-pad" that would need to be downloaded to make it work.

You don't have to imagine: `ripgrep` exists and has all of 10 direct dependencies, 4 of which by the same author because they extracted features / systems from ripgrep (or developed them separately from the start) as they were useful on their own e.g.

* regex, for obvious reasons

* ignore to match and apply ignorefiles (gitignore and friends which ripgrep takes in account by default)

* bstr for conventional utf8 strings rather than guaranteed

* grep intends to be essentially "ripgrep as a library"

I actually like some modern grep alternatives, like `ag`.