It's not weird because ripgrep has had more features than ag for a long time. Originally ripgrep didn't have multi-line support or support for fancy regex featu

It's not weird because ripgrep has had more features than ag for a long time. Originally ripgrep didn't have multi-line support or support for fancy regex features like look-around, but it has both of those now. It also has support for automatic UTF-16 transcoding, preprocessors for searching non-text files and overall less buggy support for gitignore. (Look at ag's issue tracker.) And then there's also the fact that ag isn't that great as a general purpose grep tool. It really falls over in terms of speed when searching, say, bigger files: $ time rg 'Sherlock Holmes' OpenSubtitles2018.raw.en | wc -l 7673 real 1.475 user 1.115 sys 0.356 maxmem 12511 MB faults 0 $ time ag 'Sherlock Holmes' OpenSubtitles2018.raw.en | wc -l 7673 real 20.276 user 19.850 sys 0.413 maxmem 12508 MB faults 0 A lot of people like to comment and say, "well ag is fast enough for me." Well, OK, that's fine. But if you're wondering about why other people might mention ripgrep more, well, maybe it isn't just about the way you use the tools. For example, if you only ever search tiny repositories of code, then you aren't going to care that ripgrep is faster than ag. Which is perfectly reasonable, but it should also be reasonable to be aware that others might actually search bigger corpora than you.