Comment by thiht

4 months ago

That goes against the UNIX philosophy IMO. Tools doing "one thing and doing it well" also means that tools can and should be replaced when a superior alternative emerges. That's pretty much the whole point of simple utilities. I agree that you should learn the classic tools first as it's a huge investment for a whole career, but you absolutely should learn newer alternatives too. I don't care much for bat or eza, but some alternatives like fd (find alt) or sd (sed alt) are absolute time savers.

Rust's user unfriendly build paradigm puts me off using a lot of these. Ripgrep is fine when I can install it from a package manager. But if I'm on some weird machine and need to build it then first I have to build rustc, and then it wants to download gigabytes of whatever, just to compile a better 'grep'?

  • You don't need to build rustc to build ripgrep. If you are, that's a choice you are making. Cross compilation is a thing. And what weird machine doesn't have a way to install a ripgrep binary anyway? It's pretty much everywhere these days.

  • > But if I'm on some weird machine

    Then use grep, what’s your point? grep is not going away because ripgrep is better, but ripgrep might become more available?

    I also notice you’re saying "if", so you’re not. So again, what’s your point?