git grep can be fast, depending on what you're searching for and how much you need to search. If you commonly search literals, then git grep's literal optimizat

git grep can be fast, depending on what you're searching for and how much you need to search. If you commonly search literals, then git grep's literal optimizations probably make it good enough for you. But increasing the pattern complexity just a bit can result in large performance cliffs. For example: (times reported after running each command a few times to account for I/O cache) $ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/BurntSushi/linux $ cd linux $ time LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 git grep -E '\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 20.616 user 2:02.49 sys 0.363 maxmem 64 MB $ time rg '\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 0.127 user 0.673 sys 0.617 maxmem 26 MB Both of these invocations are doing roughly equivalent work, including respecting gitignores. Both of them are using a Unicode aware `\w` character class. OK, so you might say you don't care about Unicode. That's fine, ripgrep is still faster by an order of magnitude: $ time LC_ALL=C git grep -E '\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 4.546 user 27.741 sys 0.420 maxmem 63 MB With that said, `git grep` can now be made to use PCRE2, which gives it a significant speed boost on this workload: $ time LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 git grep -P '(*UCP)\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 0.894 user 5.821 sys 0.493 maxmem 63 MB $ time LC_ALL=C git grep -P '\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 0.517 user 2.962 sys 0.596 maxmem 59 MB ripgrep can do the same as of this release, but faster: $ time rg -P '\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 0.511 user 4.795 sys 0.544 maxmem 24 MB $ time rg -P --no-pcre2-unicode '\w+_RESUME' | wc -l 1998 real 0.422 user 4.119 sys 0.479 maxmem 24 MB Do these performance differences matter to you? Maybe not. But you said you couldn't understand; hopefully the numbers above add some clarity. :-) On top of that, ripgrep works just as well outside of git repos, on huge log files, binary data or even in shell pipelines.