> GNU grep discards the Unix philosophy in all sorts of places too.
Who ever claimed that GNU was a proponent of the UNIX philosophy? Certainly not me.
> What's actually happening here is that what matters is the user experience, and the Unix philosophy is a means, not an end, to improve the user experience
Yes and no. The expression "user experience" implies that all users are the same and benefit from the same philosophy of software interface design.
> Besides, you can drop ripgrep into a shell pipeline just like you would grep. All that Unix-y goodness is still there.
The "Unix-y goodness" isn't only defined by what it can do, but also what it can't do. I don't want to turn this into a suckless rant, so I won't. Also, not having a mode giving it POSIX grep compatibility really flies in the face of that claim: I want my scripts to work on BSD, MacOS and even Solaris/AIX without having to install stuff.
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I know I may sound very smug but believe me when I say that I really like some of these utils and the care put into them (and I know you're the author of ripgrep) and that I'm no UNIX OpenBSD user (Plan 9 exists for a reason, and I favor CL over C/Go any time of the day). But I really see them as optimizing for/targeting the VSCode/Zed crowd, instead of the vim/emacs one, if you know what I mean.
> Who ever claimed that GNU was a proponent of the UNIX philosophy? Certainly not me.
Nothing was specific to GNU in that comment. `-r` is available in BSD grep too. You are being needlessly pedantic and avoiding the actual points being made while doing so.
> Yes and no. The expression "user experience" implies that all users are the same and benefit from the same philosophy of software interface design.
No, it doesn’t. You have literally made that up out of whole cloth, but it isn’t how anyone else I’m aware of defines “user experience”.
As BurntSushi pointed out, ripgrep is even designed to adapt to different means of use: as a standalone command, as a utility in a pipe, and others. Improving the usability for one use-case isn’t necessarily at the cost of others.
> I want my scripts to work on BSD, MacOS and even Solaris/AIX without having to install stuff.
So your very reasonable desire to stick with POSIX for shell scripts… means we shouldn’t ever make new tools? I’m genuinely failing to understand your point here.
In fact, having a “grep compatibility flag” would very literally be the opposite of the UNIX philosophy you’re holding up elsewhere. ripgrep isn’t grep. It isn’t trying to be grep. It’s something new and different and (in some use-cases) better. The old thing still exists and if you want to use it for whatever reason… just do that?
> Nothing was specific to GNU in that comment. `-r` is available in BSD grep too. You are being needlessly pedantic and avoiding the actual points being made while doing so.
Where's the actual point in "others do it too"?
> No, it doesn’t. You have literally made that up out of whole cloth, but it isn’t how anyone else I’m aware of defines “user experience”.
That's not a question of definition, but of use in an English sentence. If you say "this is good for user experience", you implicitly group all users together. I say some users prefer tools that do only one thing. ripgrep itself acknowledges that "despite initially not wanting to add every feature under the sun to ripgrep, over time, ripgrep has grown support for most features found in other file searching tools". And that's fine! But not for everybody.
> As BurntSushi pointed out, ripgrep is even designed to adapt to different means of use: as a standalone command, as a utility in a pipe, and others. Improving the usability for one use-case isn’t necessarily at the cost of others.
If I like the "finding files with auto filtering" part of ripgrep, how can I use it to feed another grep or even another tool? If it had been designed with the aforementioned philosophy, it would have been "ripfind" + "ripgrep" and maybe a "ripfg" pretty interface on top.
> So your very reasonable desire to stick with POSIX for shell scripts… means we shouldn’t ever make new tools? I’m genuinely failing to understand your point here.
> In fact, having a “grep compatibility flag” would very literally be the opposite of the UNIX philosophy you’re holding up
See my other reply: I love new tools, but "UNIX-like goodness" is also about portability (as in SUS), not just the philosophy. More of a misunderstanding than anything else, really.
A flag would be impossible, but introspection based on argv[0] (like Busybox) wouldn't be that far-fetched. But yeah, clearly ripgrep isn't trying to replace only grep, that was a mistake on my part.
As an addendum, the "UNIX philosophy" had a lot of crap parts (e.g. bytes as universal interchange format) and UNIX itself is a very poor implementation of said philosophy (after all, g/re/p itself is pointless porcelain over (s)ed, heh), I'm not sure discussing it seriously without specifying which part (like "do one thing") is very productive.
Happy this was thought out! Still everything in one tool, but glad modularity was truly considered.
> Except for Windows.
Of course POSIX portability doesn't apply to OSes which intentionally ignore it. I think I have another flame appreciating guy on the other side of the conversation =)
It just means that your claims about portability are, in the real world, far less useful than is imagined. I ship software to Windows users and the "portability" of POSIX doesn't help there. Doesn't matter why to me. It just means that I can't depend on POSIX for the "portability" benefits that its proponents seem to cite so enthusiastically.
> But I really see them as optimizing for/targeting the VSCode/Zed crowd, instead of the vim/emacs one, if you know what I mean.
At this point it sounds like you're making a purely aesthetic/cultural judgment, rather than a technical one. ripgrep works just fine with emacs; I have "C-c p s r" bound to "run ripgrep in current project" and use it almost every day.
OK, so you phrased your criticism very narrowly toward "lots of these Rust CLI tools," but in actuality, your criticism applies way more broadly than that. Likely to just about all of GNU's tooling, for example. And probably BSD's and busybox's tooling too. Even busybox isn't above implementing POSIX+some, and AFAIK none of them provide a strict "POSIX only" mode.
Which is fine, but now your position is more "old man yelling at clouds" than it is something specific about the Rust tools. (And to be clear, I'm not above yelling at clouds now and then.)
> Also, not having a mode giving it POSIX grep compatibility really flies in the face of that claim
No... it doesn't? ripgrep being compatible with the Unix philosophy is not the same as it being POSIX compatible. I didn't say you could use ripgrep in any place you could use grep in a drop-in compatible way. I said you could use it in shell pipelines. As in, it inter-operates with other tooling in a Unix-y way.
And besides, I don't know of any grep that has such a mode. How do you know you aren't using a grep flag that isn't available in other grep implementations?
> But I really see them as optimizing for/targeting the VSCode/Zed crowd, instead of the vim/emacs one, if you know what I mean.
Nope, I don't. I've been a vim (now neovim) user for decades. And neovim even uses ripgrep by default over grep if it's installed.
> OK, so you phrased your criticism very narrowly toward "lots of these Rust CLI tools," but in actuality, your criticism applies way more broadly than that.
Obviously. The topic was Rust CLI tools, that's why my post focused on them. Indeed, my criticism is broader.
> Likely to just about all of GNU's tooling, for example. And probably BSD's and busybox's tooling too. Even busybox isn't above implementing POSIX+some, and AFAIK none of them provide a strict "POSIX only" mode.
This isn't about POSIX or not POSIX, this is about introducing yet another pure convenience feature for something that can easily be achieved with other accompanying (guaranteed to be on the concerned platform) tools. POSIX doesn't create features anyway, it's about describing things that have already become standard; the Austin Group bug tracker is quite explicit about this.
> No... it doesn't? ripgrep being compatible with the Unix philosophy is not the same as it being POSIX compatible.
Well, just a question of interpretation of "Unix-like goodness". UNIX is both a philosophy and a portability standard (since POSIX == SUSv4). And as I said, doing one thing and doing it well is another facet of that philosophy; finding files != searching in them.
> And besides, I don't know of any grep that has such a mode. How do you know you aren't using a grep flag that isn't available in other grep implementations?
Compatibility != strict rejection of anything else, quite obviously.
> Nope, I don't. I've been a vim (now neovim) user for decades. And neovim even uses ripgrep by default over grep if it's installed.
Which is why I said vim instead of neovim (even if neovim is clearly better).
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I think you misunderstand my position because I like a bit of snark: compromising on the "do one thing" part of the UNIX philosophy isn't necessarily something horrible, but it's not an imaginary issue either. I could give other examples (like how the pretty clean xsv became https://github.com/dathere/qsv) but it really doesn't matter because I think it's more of a popular CLI "apps" thing than Rust alone, even if there's community overlap.
I can no longer see any coherent point you're trying to make.
My point is that you are treating an ideal ("do one thing and doing it well") as an end instead of a means. Moreover, you are treating it as if there is any actual choice in the matter. In reality, the tooling most of us use on the command line violates the Unix philosophy in some way or another. So the question is not "should I adhere to the Unix philosophy?" but "what makes a good user experience?"
I don't see why my point is that hard to see: the "do one thing" part of the UNIX philosophy is a good ideal to aim for, even if often ignored in favour of a more convenient kitchen sink approach. I then just mentioned that a good majority of these useful Rust tools (I really like hyperfine and oxipng, for example) don't seem to care much about it.
I’ve also been guilty of insisting on this, even when, as you point out, most tooling doesn’t strictly follow it anyway. I think it’s an overreaction from being irritated at seeing app after app fall to “now including AI,” or just pivoting for new features because it wasn’t making money fast enough.
FWIW, I’ve been using *nix for about 25 years, and had zero problems adapting to ripgrep. You kept -i and -v, which honestly covers 90% of common usage.
Sorry for the late reply. I just wanted to say that I don't think AI has anything to do with this. I've been seeing this sort of complaining, goal post shifting and confusing means with ends for probably decades now. I mean, AI was around then too, but not like it is today, which is what I assume you meant. Even when I release ripgrep ~9 years ago, AI wasn't what it was today, and I saw the same sort of complaints.
I don't usually like doing this, but if I had to step out of my wheelhouse and guesstimate, I think it's probably just some form of nostalgia reasoning. People remember the "simpler" times and just want to have it again. But of course, the "simpler" times are less a reflection of reality and more a reflection of your perception of the world. IMO anyway. (I have the same sort of inclination, but I try to recognize it for what it is: personal bias. Others seem unable to do this and mistake this personal bias for objective reality.)
A tool doesn't need to support locales to be used in a shell pipeline. The Unix philosophy and shell pipelines were born long before POSIX locales. I even specifically contrasted this with POSIX compatibility. So it seems to me like you're disingenuously interpreting my words at this point.
That isn't true. ripgrep will happily pass through data it gets as-is. It just itself doesn't support locales. Commands do not need to have locale support to be used in shell pipelines. `rg foo | rg -v bar` is an example that has nothing to do with locales but demonstrates that ripgrep can be used in shell pipelines.
If foo prints $'O\u011Fuz' and LC_ALL is set to a valid UTF-8 locale, bar will receive what foo printed. If foo prints $'O\xF0uz' and LC_ALL is assigned a valid ISO-8859 locale, again, bar will receive what foo printed; because foo, bar, and grep are compatible. You can't have that with ripgrep; you'll have to modify the shell script in between or worse, manually parse LC_ALL and hope ripgrep supports the encoding
First of all, that doesn't invalidate literally anything I said. I have never claimed that ripgrep supported locales. I only said that it could be used in shell pipelines. That doesn't mean it can be used in all shell pipelines in exactly the same way that grep can. I even clarified this explicitly. Which is why you are a troll.
Second of all, you're just wrong. ripgrep uses UTF-8 by default, but you don't have to use it. And when you switch your locale to ISO-8859 (who uses that!?!? why does it mater!?!?), you are no longer emitting UTF-8. As you obviously know or else you wouldn't have been able to come up with the example.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you can disable Unicode mode in ripgrep:
I'm sure you can get creative. :-) You can set an environment variable to control the encoding, expose a flag or any one of a number of other things to control the encoding. Either way, now you're just shifting the goalposts.
You've also continued to ignore my most substantive rebuttal: that a specific example where ripgrep is not compatible with grep or doesn't behave the same doesn't mean it can't be used in shell pipelines. I use ripgrep in shell pipelines all of the time. As do many others. Literally nothing you've said has invalidated anything I've said. All you're doing is finding things that some implementations of grep can do that ripgrep (intentionally) cannot do in exactly the same way. But that's fine, because ripgrep was never, isn't and will never be compatible with grep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#pos...
So if you need grep compatibility get a fucking clue and just use grep.
> You can set an environment variable to control the encoding
Yes, that's what LC_ALL is. Every other tool understands it except ripgrep. Even if you parse it by hand, there's no guarantee that ripgrep will support the encoding.
Apples vs. oranges. Busybox is a suite of minimal tools for low-resource systems, lack of QoL features you wouldn't need in such an environment is its selling point. Besides you won't see anyone claiming individual busybox tools can be used in shell scripts just fine.
It's easier to admit ripgrep is rather a supplementary tool that is incompatible with the tooling your typical Unix-like operating system provides out of the box than a "modern replacement" for grep and move on.
So you lied. Now you've shifted the goalposts after being called out on it. And ripgrep has no problems being used in shell pipelines. What ripgrep has a problem doing is being drop-in compatible for grep, because that isn't its goal.
> "modern replacement" for grep
I have literally never called ripgrep this. So more lies and straw-manning from you. ripgrep's repo neither positions itself as a replacement or as "modern." And in the FAQ about "replacing" grep, it makes a nuanced claim that accounts for all of this. It specifically says you should use grep when you need the features of grep that aren't in ripgrep.
It's not strange because ripgrep doesn't understand non-UTF-8 data (unless there's a UTF-16 BOM, in which case, ripgrep will automatically understand it). But you can tell it to:
The person you're responding to has been trolling in this thread (and others) by twisting words and claiming multiple false things. When I've fixed their errors, they don't acknowledge them as mistakes and just keep on twisting words.
Who ever claimed that GNU was a proponent of the UNIX philosophy? Certainly not me.
> What's actually happening here is that what matters is the user experience, and the Unix philosophy is a means, not an end, to improve the user experience
Yes and no. The expression "user experience" implies that all users are the same and benefit from the same philosophy of software interface design.
> Besides, you can drop ripgrep into a shell pipeline just like you would grep. All that Unix-y goodness is still there.
The "Unix-y goodness" isn't only defined by what it can do, but also what it can't do. I don't want to turn this into a suckless rant, so I won't. Also, not having a mode giving it POSIX grep compatibility really flies in the face of that claim: I want my scripts to work on BSD, MacOS and even Solaris/AIX without having to install stuff.
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I know I may sound very smug but believe me when I say that I really like some of these utils and the care put into them (and I know you're the author of ripgrep) and that I'm no UNIX OpenBSD user (Plan 9 exists for a reason, and I favor CL over C/Go any time of the day). But I really see them as optimizing for/targeting the VSCode/Zed crowd, instead of the vim/emacs one, if you know what I mean.