Products · Product
ripgrep
Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 12 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 19 complaints
- Too many files get ignored by default, so the user must pass -u every time2026-03-24
- Implicit ignore files made it hard to get rg to behave, so the user gave up2026-03-24
- Files listed in .git/info/exclude silently disappear from search results, making them hard to find2026-03-24
- Can't tell what files it is ignoring and why, with too many settings2026-03-24
- Ignores .github directories because they are hidden, so users must add exceptions2025-10-20
- Regex dialects differ across tools, so learning ripgrep adds another set of quirks2022-10-19
- Skips hidden files by default, so config directories like .github and .gitlab are missed2022-10-17
- Unsure whether a search missed results or silently skipped files, so it can't be trusted2022-07-24
- Word boundary escape differs from GNU grep, causing errors and needing to remember different syntax2022-06-12
- Its regex syntax differs from grep's, so switching to it is hard2022-06-12
- Missing alias made it hard to adopt; the commander prefers a CLI that makes sense and stays stable2021-06-14
- Case-sensitive default is unintuitive, and users forget smart-case isn't on by default2021-06-14
- Output format changes between terminal and pipe, which is annoying2020-08-10
- Some found results missing from top of screen until user scrolls2019-05-22
- Can't stop rg from honoring .gitignore without also skipping .rgignore2019-05-21
- Default search silently skips hidden files, so matches are missed2019-02-27
- User can't figure out how to filter search by file type in rg2017-10-20
- Silently skips binary files, so searches find nothing with no explanation2017-10-09
- Filtering by a list of file extensions requires convoluted workarounds compared to ag2017-09-04