swiper VS ripgrep

Compare swiper vs ripgrep and see what are their differences.

swiper

Ivy - a generic completion frontend for Emacs, Swiper - isearch with an overview, and more. Oh, man! (by abo-abo)

ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore (by BurntSushi)
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swiper ripgrep
37 368
2,356 53,636
0.1% 1.8%
8.0 6.7
about 2 months ago 7 days ago
Emacs Lisp Rust
- The Unlicense
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

swiper

Posts with mentions or reviews of swiper. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-07-21.
  • Increasing productivity by better managing multiple terminals in Emacs
    2 projects | dev.to | 21 Jul 2024
  • Flexible, simple tools for minibuffer completion in Emacs
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
  • org attach multiple files with ivy-call
    1 project | /r/emacs | 18 Jun 2023
  • An Improved Emacs Search
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 29 May 2023
    This is a good improvement. Personally though I left isearch behind. For further search convenience / functionality I highly recommend swiper.
  • Best emacs configs for Javascript and/or users who don't like to memorize keybindings?
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 24 Apr 2023
    Next you "only" have to remember (elisp) function names. "Completion UIs" like ivy/counsel, icomplete, helm or vertico/consult, give you a nice auto completion list on M-x (choose the one of them, you like the most). Some of those Completion UIs will display existing keybindings and a short documentation for commands, near the auto complete candidates. So you will start to remember more keybindings without "learning sessions", just because invoking functions via keybindings is much faster (more convenient).
  • What packages do the cool kids use these days?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 9 Apr 2023
    Proposal 4 (group-function). This one is an actual addition, which allows candidate gouping in the style of Helm. Note that it is a pure addition. Completion UIs and completion packages work perfectly fine without it. It wouldn't be difficult to add support to Ivy. I wrote the patch.
  • How to Make Emacs Look Cooler with Simple Customization
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 10 Mar 2023
    For the unfamiliar, Swiper is a part of Ivy which lets you search through your buffer with a preview of match candidates: you type some text you're looking for, and up pops a list of matching lines in the minibuffer that you can then use the arrow keys, C-n C-p etc. to scroll through and select the one you want.
  • Replacing packages with more "stripped down" packages
    9 projects | /r/emacs | 19 Dec 2022
    When I started using Emacs I was following the setup outlined by System Crafters, which I still think is a really good introduction. But, over the last few months I've started to replace packages with more "minimalist" or "stripped down" packages. I've switched from Ivy and Counsel to Vertico and Consult, and recently I switched from company to corfu for auto-completion.
  • macOS DWIM "Open with" command (ok, last one for a while)
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 14 Oct 2022
    Ah, neat. I hadn't considered appending comments for searchability. I'm currently getting searchabiity from M-x dwim-... and ivy completion.
  • How do you take book notes?
    1 project | /r/OrgRoam | 12 Oct 2022
    Great question. I have one big file with a few hundreds book and quotations from them. Problem is with newlines. When I copy text from kindle it doesn't have newlines because it's depends on font size. So every quotation from book is on one line - could be few thousands chars. I use visual-line-mode and there is a big problem with that. Like swiper would just freeze your emacs if you try to search. https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper/issues/925 Anyone have same problem?

ripgrep

Posts with mentions or reviews of ripgrep. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-06-19.
  • Stop struggling with Rust CLI tool installs: the only guide you need (Mac, Linux, Windows)
    5 projects | dev.to | 19 Jun 2025
    ripgrep GitHub Fast alternative to grep
  • Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2025
    I didn't call ripgrep a replacement. Other people do. Because it does actually replace their usage of grep.

    https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#can...

  • Replacing Kubernetes with Systemd
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2025
    > The maintainer also has been pretty rude to me about this on HN.

    This is AFAIK the only other interaction we've had: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051587

    > but it's still crazy to think people won't be caught off guard by this behavior

    Straw-manning is also crazy. :-) People have and will absolutely be caught off guard by the behavior. On the flip side, as I said 9 months ago, ripgrep's default behavior is easily one of the most cited positive features of ripgrep aside from its performance.

    The other crazy thing here is... you don't have to use ripgrep! It is very specifically intended as a departure from traditional grep behavior. Because if you want traditional grep behavior, then you can just use grep. Hence why ripgrep's binary name is not `grep`, unlike many other implementations of POSIX grep.

    > Its name is literally indicating it's a grep replacement.

    I also tried to correct this 9 months ago too. See also: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#pos...

    For anyone else following along at home, if you want ripgrep to search the same files that GNU grep searches, then do `rg -uuu`. Or, if you don't want ripgrep to respect your gitignores but ignore hidden and binary files, then do `rg -u`.

  • ripgrep: Not Just a Faster grep, but a Sharper One
    2 projects | dev.to | 27 Apr 2025
    When you think ripgrep (rg), you probably think "fast regex search tool."
  • fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2025
    I'm sure you can get creative. :-) You can set an environment variable to control the encoding, expose a flag or any one of a number of other things to control the encoding.

    You've also continued to ignore my most substantive rebuttal: that a specific example where ripgrep is not compatible with grep or doesn't behave the same doesn't mean it can't be used in shell pipelines. Literally nothing you've said has invalidated anything I've said. All you're doing is finding things that some implementations of grep can do that ripgrep (intentionally) cannot do in exactly the same way. But that's fine, because ripgrep was never, isn't and will never be compatible with grep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#pos...

    So if you need grep compatibility get a fucking clue and just use grep.

  • I stopped everything and started writing C again
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Mar 2025
    > Rust applications are sometimes (often?) slower than comparable C applications

    Could you cite some examples? There are plenty of counter-examples

    - ripgrep is 5-10x faster than grep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/962d47e6a1208cf21...)

    - Memory-safe implementations of PNG (png, zune-png, wuffs) now dramatically outperform memory-unsafe ones (libpng, spng, stb_image) when decoding images. (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ha7uyi/memorysafe_pn...)

    - I don't consider the benchmarks game a worthwhile comparison because they're only writing assembly, but Rust and C are comparable in speed (https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...)

    - Advent of Code - I came across Rust codebases which solved all of AoC 2024 in under 1 millisecond (almost fully assembly), and also ordinary, idiomatic code in under 100 milliseconds. I don't recall anyone ever posting a C codebase with perf measurements, but I could have missed this.

    I'm surprised by the "often", but I'd be interested in any cases where C outperforms Rust. Please share if you've found any.

  • How to combine rg with less in terminal
    1 project | dev.to | 30 Jan 2025
  • 17 Essential CLI Tools to Boost Developer Productivity
    16 projects | dev.to | 2 Jan 2025
    ripgrep
  • Resolving a mysterious problem with find
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Nov 2024
  • fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Sep 2024
    The original comment said nothing about modifying servers or AWS engineers installing random shit. That was you. I responded to "moving binaries around," and you started yapping about change management. Two totally different things. Like obviously if you have a locked down environment, then only install what you need. But this is not what the original poster was referring to specifically.

    ripgrep even specifically calls out this exact use case right in its README: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/?tab=readme-ov-file#wh...

    > You need a portable and ubiquitous tool. While ripgrep works on Windows, macOS and Linux, it is not ubiquitous and it does not conform to any standard such as POSIX. The best tool for this job is good old grep.

    So, you presume too much friendo. Now, go away.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing swiper and ripgrep you can also consider the following projects:

consult - :mag: consult.el - Consulting completing-read

ugrep - 🔍 ugrep 7.5 file pattern searcher -- a user-friendly, faster, more capable grep replacement. Includes a TUI, Google-like Boolean search with AND/OR/NOT, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches (nested) archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and more

vertico - :dizzy: vertico.el - VERTical Interactive COmpletion

fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'

helm - Emacs incremental completion and selection narrowing framework

Parallel

Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
featured
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured

Did you know that Emacs Lisp is
the 26th most popular programming language
based on number of references?