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ripgrep definitely goes against the Unix philosophy. This is intentional. The Unix philosophy is a means to an end, and not an end unto itself. The key way that

ripgrep definitely goes against the Unix philosophy. This is intentional. The Unix philosophy is a means to an end, and not an end unto itself. The key way that ripgrep violates the Unix philosophy is that it couples the filtering of what to search with the act of searching. You hit the nail on the head with styling, because the output of ripgrep is itself the thing that prevents composability. However, from my own observations (and my own use), folks seem to appreciate having some amount of coupling and integration here. I've often seen folks claim that a legitimate use case (for them) for ripgrep is to "replace crazy 'find ./ ... | xargs' concoctions." The degree to which the aforementioned is "crazy" or not varies based on the individual, but there's a not insubstantial number of people who appreciate the succinctness that coupling brings. As the maintainer, the coupling is annoying, because it means ripgrep needs to implement more stuff. For example, ripgrep provides a `--sort-files` option, which is something that standard grep doesn't need because you can fairly easy compose its output with 'sort'. You could do the same with ripgrep (ripgrep supports the standard composable grep output format), but then you lose the "pretty styling" that users appreciate. So you have no choice. In terms of giving more structure to output, I am mostly unconvinced by your argument, but I've been happily using text streams as my user interface for a very long time, and I like its balance. With that said, the next release of ripgrep will come with a --json flag, which enables structured output. :-)

bradknowles 8y ago
Which I can then pipe to "gron" so that I can make something sensible and greppable out of that json output, right? ;)
- dflock 8y ago
  Well, you could pipe it to "jq" - https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
  - needlepont 8y ago
    Which is a pretty abominable tool TBH. It breaks on just about every little edge and isn't very useful unless you like to see pretty colors and nested outputs + learn it's terrible output formatting spec. When using json I still use jansson for quick one offs.
jgtrosh 8y ago
I wonder if there is or could be a good standard way of providing decoupled tools and their coupled interface. Last year I wrote a friendly script to search content on YouTube, which prints human-readable content if plugged to a terminal and URLs otherwise, and another one which applies a pattern to turn such YouTube URLs to the underlying video or audio streams using youtube-dl. (I don't think this plays along nicely with YouTube's ToS but whatever I'm the only user.) The obvious use case is to look at the output of the first command, and then pipe it to the second after choosing what to watch, and find a way to feed that to mplayer. So you'd want to provide a shortcut script, maybe make it interactive… but when does it go from an alias to a new program altogether? This interaction is very intuitive in the browser and I find trying to reproduce it with a CLI tool is quite challenging. Btw I love ripgrep, it made me look very hip in front of colleagues a couple of times.
needlepont 8y ago
I've never understood complaints like this. If you are proficient in the unix environment any sort of gymnastics can be handled via generation of some 'object' from plaintext and command generation on the fly. find $PATH -name '.c' -exec grep -l socket {} \; | awk ' {printf "mv %s %s\n",$0,sprintf("%s.old",$0)}' find $PATH -name '.c' -exec grep -l socket {} \; | awk ' BEGIN {n=0} {printf "{\"items\": \%s",sprintf("[\"%d\",\"%s\"]}\n",n++,$0)}' If you aren't proficient or have an aesthetic or religious aversion to unix userland and traditional tools you'll play some other game I guess. Reinventing the wheel without understanding the model and power is a next-gen game. I don't have time for it.
- burntsushi 8y ago
  Just because I built ripgrep doesn't mean I've reinvented a wheel without understanding the existing model/power, so your criticism feels a bit disingenuous to me. To be clear, with the current release of ripgrep, you cannot create structured objects from its output as easily as you might think. I get that it's fun to show how to do it with long shell pipelines for simple cases, but the current release of ripgrep would actually require you to parse color escape sequences in order to find all of the match boundaries in each line. This is what tools like VS Code do, for example. The --json output format rectifies that. There are other solutions that might be closer to the text format, but they're just more contortions on the line oriented output format that aren't clearly useful for human consumption, and it's much simpler to just give people what they want: JSON.
  - needlepont 8y ago
    Wasn't referring specifically to you.. but to the gist of the article and the post previous to yours I believe. On the ansi escape sequences to find matches, etc...yes, I get what your tool does but having to tokenize against ansi escape codes and other ad-hoc env artifacts is something I'm glad to leave to authors that enjoy it...not that it is terribly difficult unless you decide to reinvent the wheel and optimize everything.

bradknowles 8y ago

Which I can then pipe to "gron" so that I can make something sensible and greppable out of that json output, right? ;)

dflock 8y ago
Well, you could pipe it to "jq" - https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
- needlepont 8y ago
  Which is a pretty abominable tool TBH. It breaks on just about every little edge and isn't very useful unless you like to see pretty colors and nested outputs + learn it's terrible output formatting spec. When using json I still use jansson for quick one offs.

jgtrosh 8y ago

I wonder if there is or could be a good standard way of providing decoupled tools and their coupled interface. Last year I wrote a friendly script to search content on YouTube, which prints human-readable content if plugged to a terminal and URLs otherwise, and another one which applies a pattern to turn such YouTube URLs to the underlying video or audio streams using youtube-dl. (I don't think this plays along nicely with YouTube's ToS but whatever I'm the only user.) The obvious use case is to look at the output of the first command, and then pipe it to the second after choosing what to watch, and find a way to feed that to mplayer. So you'd want to provide a shortcut script, maybe make it interactive… but when does it go from an alias to a new program altogether? This interaction is very intuitive in the browser and I find trying to reproduce it with a CLI tool is quite challenging. Btw I love ripgrep, it made me look very hip in front of colleagues a couple of times.

needlepont 8y ago

I've never understood complaints like this. If you are proficient in the unix environment any sort of gymnastics can be handled via generation of some 'object' from plaintext and command generation on the fly. find $PATH -name '.c' -exec grep -l socket {} \; | awk ' {printf "mv %s %s\n",$0,sprintf("%s.old",$0)}' find $PATH -name '.c' -exec grep -l socket {} \; | awk ' BEGIN {n=0} {printf "{\"items\": \%s",sprintf("[\"%d\",\"%s\"]}\n",n++,$0)}' If you aren't proficient or have an aesthetic or religious aversion to unix userland and traditional tools you'll play some other game I guess. Reinventing the wheel without understanding the model and power is a next-gen game. I don't have time for it.

burntsushi 8y ago
Just because I built ripgrep doesn't mean I've reinvented a wheel without understanding the existing model/power, so your criticism feels a bit disingenuous to me. To be clear, with the current release of ripgrep, you cannot create structured objects from its output as easily as you might think. I get that it's fun to show how to do it with long shell pipelines for simple cases, but the current release of ripgrep would actually require you to parse color escape sequences in order to find all of the match boundaries in each line. This is what tools like VS Code do, for example. The --json output format rectifies that. There are other solutions that might be closer to the text format, but they're just more contortions on the line oriented output format that aren't clearly useful for human consumption, and it's much simpler to just give people what they want: JSON.
- needlepont 8y ago
  Wasn't referring specifically to you.. but to the gist of the article and the post previous to yours I believe. On the ansi escape sequences to find matches, etc...yes, I get what your tool does but having to tokenize against ansi escape codes and other ad-hoc env artifacts is something I'm glad to leave to authors that enjoy it...not that it is terribly difficult unless you decide to reinvent the wheel and optimize everything.