Making tools whose names end in "grep" that don't behave exactly the same way as grep itself is almost as old as grep. Every Unix-like system has egrep and fgre

Making tools whose names end in "grep" that don't behave exactly the same way as grep itself is almost as old as grep. Every Unix-like system has egrep and fgrep, for instance (in fact, they're usually symlinks to the same executable as grep itself, and I at least pretty much always use egrep in preference to grep). There's an approximate-search tool called agrep that's also decades old and pretty widely used. ripgrep is no more "totally different" from grep than egrep (different regex syntax) and fgrep (not regexes at all) are.