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Terminal tools earn a permanent place in your workflow when they remove a task you repeat every day: finding a file, searching code, staging a commit, or switching branches without reaching for the mouse. The ten tools below cover those jobs well. The headline’s “14.7x faster than grep” figure, however, does not appear in ripgrep’s published benchmarks. The project’s own example reports a 10.69x difference on one specific test, and it warns that a single benchmark is never enough. The sections that follow explain what the numbers do and do not show.
The ten tools and the jobs they take over
The list below mirrors the daily-use selection in a July 5, 2026 article by Travis Media. It reflects one writer’s choices, not a consensus ranking, and it is not confirmed to be the list in the DEV Community post that carries the same title, whose full text could not be checked.
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| Tool | Job it simplifies | What to know before adopting it |
|---|---|---|
| fzf | Fuzzy-selecting from lists: shell history, files, directories, Git branches, and running processes | Most useful when hooked into your shell so selection replaces typing full paths or hashes. |
| fd | Finding files by name with shorter syntax than find | Skips hidden and ignored files by default. Use fd -H to include hidden files and fd -I to ignore ignore rules. |
| ripgrep (rg) | Recursively searching file contents with regular expressions | Respects .gitignore and skips hidden and binary files by default. See the defaults section below. |
| lazygit | Staging, committing, branching, cherry-picking, stashing, and interactive rebase in a terminal interface | It makes Git operations visual, but you still need to understand what each action does to history. |
| k9s | Navigating and inspecting Kubernetes resources in a live terminal view | Relevant chiefly if you work with Kubernetes clusters and have cluster access configured. |
| Starship | Shell prompt showing directory, Git state, and language versions | Setup happens in your shell configuration file; check the project’s current installation steps for your shell. |
| GitHub CLI (gh) | Common GitHub tasks, including creating and checking out pull requests | Requires authenticating your GitHub account from the terminal before most commands work. |
| GNU Stow | Managing configuration files as symlinks from a dotfiles repository | If a target file already exists in your home directory, Stow reports a conflict; move or back up the existing file first. |
| age with SOPS | Encrypting and editing secrets files | Encryption protects the file, not the key. Key storage and backup decide whether the secrets stay safe. |
| neovim | Editing files directly in a terminal | Configuration advice changes between releases; check it against the current neovim documentation before relying on it. |
Start with three, then add others as needs appear
The Travis Media article recommends starting with tools that relieve a friction you already feel, and its own first picks are fzf, ripgrep, and lazygit for an ordinary developer. Add the rest when a specific need shows up. These three are a reasonable starting set because each covers a task most developers repeat many times a day:
- fzf for picking history entries, files, and branches without retyping them.
- ripgrep for finding every occurrence of a symbol, string, or pattern across a project.
- lazygit for staging hunks and managing branches when the command-line sequence is tedious to recall.
Add k9s only if you manage Kubernetes, and add age with SOPS only when you handle encrypted secrets files. Those two need infrastructure most readers do not have.
#1 Best Overall
What the ripgrep benchmark actually measured
ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool. It recursively searches the current directory for a regular-expression pattern and, by default, respects .gitignore rules and skips hidden files, hidden directories, and binary files. The project documents support on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The project’s README contains several comparisons. The one most relevant to this claim searches the Linux kernel source tree on an Intel i9-12900K system running at 5.2 GHz, and compares ripgrep with GNU grep in a setup where ripgrep’s ignore behavior is disabled and the search is restricted to C and header files. Both tools find the same 447 matching lines:
| Tool and command type | Matching lines | Reported time |
|---|---|---|
ripgrep, rg -uuu -tc -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND' |
447 | 0.063 seconds |
| GNU grep, recursive search with C and header-file filters and the same word match | 447 | 0.674 seconds |
The README expresses this difference as 10.69x. These timings come from the project’s documentation, and the page does not show when they were measured. They are not a live test performed for this article, and they describe one corpus on one machine.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesThe same README also reports a separate single-large-file comparison in which the relative performance differs materially from the kernel-tree result. Patterns that are difficult to match and searches that produce very high match counts also change the gap. That is why a single “X times faster” figure is misleading: the ratio depends on what you search, which options you use, how output is handled, and whether both tools are doing equivalent work.
The 14.7x figure in the headline does not appear in the ripgrep results reviewed for this article. The full method behind the original DEV Community post could not be checked, so its “measured live” claim stays unverified.
How to test speed on your own code
If you want to know whether ripgrep is faster on your projects, a fair test looks like this:
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- Pick a realistic corpus, such as one of your own repositories, rather than a single large file or a clean kernel tree.
- Make both tools do the same work. ripgrep skips .gitignore entries, hidden files, and binary files by default, while grep does not, so match the file set before comparing timings.
- Confirm the match counts agree. If they differ, the timings do not measure the same task.
- Run each command several times with the shell’s
timekeyword, and discard the first run so filesystem caching does not skew the result:time rg -n 'PATTERN' . - Record the machine, the exact commands, and the corpus size alongside the timings so the result can be reproduced.
Defaults that change your results
- Ignored files: ripgrep skips paths listed in .gitignore. Add
--no-ignoreto search them. - Hidden files: ripgrep skips hidden files and directories. Add
--hiddento include them. - Binary files: ripgrep skips binary files. The README’s
-uuushorthand turns off ignore rules, hidden-file skipping, and binary-file skipping together.
fd uses similar defaults, so a file that seems to be missing from a search may simply be excluded by a rule you have not chosen to override.
Setup and platform checks before you commit
- Verify installation and shell-integration instructions against each project’s current documentation, because these steps change between releases.
- Confirm platform support on your operating system before building a workflow around a tool.
- Check any neovim configuration against the release you actually run.
- Confirm that k9s can reach your cluster through your existing kubeconfig before judging the tool.
- Store age private keys separately from the encrypted files they unlock, and keep a tested backup.
Choosing your starting set
- Do you repeat a task several times a day, such as searching code or switching branches? Start with the tool for that task.
- Do you already have a shell where fzf or Starship can be integrated? Those tools return the most value when they are wired into the prompt and history.
- Are your repositories large or full of generated files? Test ripgrep and fd on your own tree before deciding.
- Do you need a benchmark before you switch? Use the test steps above and report the numbers with their conditions.
A small set you use every day will do more for your workflow than ten tools you install and forget.
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