In my case, I am still using ag because rg doesn't seem to be better enough to switch. What's the big deal with rg vs ag?
I had a similar thing with bash vs zsh before I learned about oh-my-zsh. Nushell also seems attractive these days... the good stuff from PowerShell in a POSIX-like shell.
Look at ag's issue tracker. There are some very critical bugs. You might be impacted by them and not even know it.
As for perf, it's not hard to witness a 10x improvement that you'll actually feel. On my checkout of the Linux kernel:
$ (time rg -wi '\w+(PM_RESUME|LINK_REQ)') | wc -l
real 0.114
user 0.547
sys 0.543
maxmem 29 MB
faults 0
444
$ (time ag -wi '\w+(PM_RESUME|LINK_REQ)') | wc -l
real 0.949
user 6.618
sys 0.805
maxmem 65 MB
faults 0
444
$ (time rg Openbox) | wc -l
real 0.296
user 1.349
sys 1.950
maxmem 71 MB
faults 0
11
$ (time ag Openbox) | wc -l
real 1.528
user 1.849
sys 8.285
maxmem 29 MB
faults 0
11
$ time ag '^\w{42}$' full.txt
ERR: Skipping full.txt: pcre_exec() can't handle files larger than 2147483647 bytes.been using both for many years now, have never ran into issues or even been able to tell any difference in speed, let alone 10x
what I notice unfortunatly, is that I often miss search results with rg becuase I forget I need to pass the additional -i flag. this has shaped my perception of rg - extra focus on performance, sub-optimal ux
Whether smart case is enabled by default (as ag does) could easily go either way. Notably,.I think having it disabled by default is a better UX. But ripgrep does have a --smart-case flag, which you can add to an alias or a ripgrep config file. It also works more consistently than ag's smart case feature, which has bugs.
See my other comments about perf difference. And ag has several very critical bugs. And it's unmaintained.
> or even been able to tell any difference in speed
If you only search small amounts of data, then even a naive and very slow grep is likely just fine from a perf perspective.
ripgrep is a lot faster (which you might only notice on larger haystacks), has many fewer bugs and is maintained.