ripgrep

Ripgrep (rg) does what grep does but dramatically faster. It's a command-line search tool that respects your .gitignore, skips binary files, and searches recursively by default.

Unlicense (public domain). Written in Rust for speed. In benchmarks, ripgrep consistently beats grep, ag (The Silver Searcher), and ack. On large codebases the difference is seconds vs minutes. VS Code uses ripgrep under the hood for its file search, that's how fast it is.

Everything is free. No paid tier, no cloud version. It's a command-line binary you install and use. Available on every package manager: brew, apt, cargo, choco, scoop.

The catch: honestly, there isn't much of one. ripgrep is one of those tools that's just better than what it replaced. The only real limitation is that it's regex-only, no fuzzy matching. If you need approximate matching, look at fzf for interactive fuzzy finding. And if you're deeply invested in GNU grep's exact behavior and flags, rg's flag names are slightly different, which can trip up muscle memory.