petdance

No matter what you do, at least one person will be unhappy about it.

I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use.

"We've never heard of that happening, so no."

What does "dead" mean?

I suggest that there are no meaningful conclusions to be gleaned from the TIOBE rankings.

Can you dedicate employee time to help on the projects?

It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.

Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.

The reference to "Programming Perl" was no doubt helped along by Perl developer Jesse Sheidlower who worked at the OED in the early 2000s. From his Wikipedia page: "Although not a computer programmer by training, Sheidlower introduced Perl to the North American offices of Oxford University Press and developed tools for data manipulation when no programmers were available. He is also one of the core developers of Catalyst, a popular Perl web development framework."

I use almost none of its more esoteric features

Which features do you see as esoteric?

What makes ugrep better for your use cases?

That still might run afoul of locked down networks like I've seen at banks. Users couldn't install any binaries at all, but with something like ack it's just cut & paste some text into a text file. ack can literally be a select-all, Ctrl-C, switch windows, "cat > ack", Ctrl-V.

Here's another site of mine y'all may be interested in: https://altbox.dev/

It's a collection of improved shell tools, organized by the tool they supplement.

As with this feature comparison chart, patches and suggestions are welcome: https://github.com/petdance/altbox

What do you love about ugrep?

"grep | head" doesn't limit the length of output lines, but "grep | cut" would.

However, ack and ripgrep's default unpiped output is grouped by file, and if you pipe the output, it doesn't do the grouped output.

The idea of "supposed to be used" is also different for ack than it is for grep. ack is specifically less of a general-use tool than grep. It's meant for searching source code. This is also why I have never said that ack is a replacement for grep.

The "print lines by number" was there because earlier versions of ack had a `--line=N` feature, where you could say "ack --line=15-18" and print those four lines. I dropped it because it was hardly any better than using sed.

If you've got suggestions on improvements, please submit an issue. I'd love to hear them.

https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/issues

That's how I had it at first.

I originally had it as a "phrasebook" of how to do the same thing in the different tools, but it was really ugly and took up a lot of horizontal space, and I figured it was more useful as a chart of yes/no. Also, there were cases where two tools had pretty much the same feature, but not exactly, so just listing flags didn't make sense.

I've still got a lot of the data of the switches in the JSON file that I build the chart from. https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/blob/dev/features.json If you've got ideas on how to bring back the phrasebook format, either integrated into this page, or as a separate standalone page, I'd love to hear them. Maybe the phrasebook isn't best done as a table like this, for example. Open a ticket in GitHub and let me know your thoughts.

If there are things you think are confusing or inaccurate, please do make GitHub issues for them. Thanks.

Or maybe I just need to move it up in my priority stack.

There are a ton of articles out there about it:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ripgrep+%2B+fzf

I'm glad you appreciate that you can install ack anywhere. It's exactly for that use case that I have kept ack able to be a single text file download. Also, it only requires Perl 5.10.1, so it's OK if you're using an old Perl.

Please note that the chart is a bit out of date. ripgrep has some features that aren't shown on the chart yet. Patches welcome if anyone wants to help.

https://github.com/beyondgrep/website

I do not know of a competitor who has put the care into such a tool to even try to measure, though.

As an aside, I'm the author of ack, and I would ask that folks not use the word "competitor" to describe different projects in the same space. Speaking for me/ack and burntsushi/ripgrep, there is absolutely no competition between us. We have different projects that do similar things, and neither of us is trying to best the other. We are each trying to make the best project we can for the needs we are looking to fill. ripgrep won't replace ack, ack won't replace ripgrep, and neither one will replace plain ol' grep. Each has its place.

I believe this so strongly that I created a [feature comparison chart](https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/) comparing various greplike tools, and a related blog post I wrote on this: [The best open source project for someone might not be yours, and that's OK](https://blog.petdance.com/2018/01/02/the-best-open-source-pr...)

It's one of a number of greplike tools out there. Here's a comparison chart:

https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

If you're looking for other alternative shell tools, take a look at https://altbox.dev/

Please let me know what's new so that I can update the chart. Dumping into an issue will do, and then I can worry about getting it into chart format.

https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/issues

exa looks pretty slick, except for having the keys required be on the two weakest fingers of my left hand. :-(

Note that rg and ag don't have the same feature sets. Here's a handy chart that shows the differences.

https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

Various grepalike tools like ack, ag and rg have been mentioned. Most comments seem to be based on which tool runs simple searches faster, but note that their feature sets vary widely.

Here's a handy chart that compares the features of each of these tools, along with git grep and plain ol' GNU grep.

https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

Here's a feature comparison chart of the various grepalike tools:

https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

Sounds like your idea of "culture fit" means excluding married people or people with families. That's likely to run afoul of US EEOC guidelines.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/inquiries_marital_status...

Teaching a love of books and learning to children isn't about disseminating information.

There are also many poor folks who don't have the money for the technology you do. The library provides information services to everyone, regardless of social class or ability to pay. What if you were poor and looking for a job and had no computer or phone? To many, the library is a lifeline.

http://www.ala.org/news/news/pressreleases2010/april2010/poo...

The library is a safe place to go after school. In my town, the library hosts an after-school snack program sponsored by the local food bank. http://mchenrycountyliving.com/event/school-snack-program/

I know that for most of us on Hacker News, we swim in technology and information, but for many others in society, the library is their entry to that world.

I don't know. If I remembered I'd have attributed it. I noted that it wasn't mine as the next-best-thing.