Simon Willison’s Weblog

How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow (via) I’m already a keen user of ripgrep (a crazy-fast grep alternative) but fzf was new to me: it’s a CLI utility that lets you pipe in a list of strings, then gives you a typeahead search interface to search and select a string before returning the selected string to stdout when you hit enter. This means you can pipe it together with other tools to add a dynamic selection step, which has all kinds of delightful combinations. “vi $(find . | fzf)” for example opens vi against the file you selected. # 5th July 2019, 5:51 pm

ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift} (via) Andrew Gallant’s post from September 2016 introducing ripgrep, the command-line grep tool he wrote using Rust (on top of the Rust regular expression library also written by Andrew). ripgrep is a beautifully designed CLI interface and is crazy fast, and this post describes how it gets its performance in a huge amount of detail, right down to comparing the different algorithmic approaches used by other similar tools. I recently learned that ripgrep ships as part of VS Code, which is why VS Code’s search-across-project feature is so fast. In fact, if you dig around in the OS X package you can find the rg binary already installed on your mac: find /Applications/Visual* | grep bin/rg # 16th April 2019, 5:52 pm