I came across ugrep recently and I immediately recognized the organization as one that I had dealt with starting about 15 years go. The author is brilliant‡, but extremely prickly (sometimes even to paying customers). The author of ripgrep, on the other hand, has always seemed like someone who just wants to get on with the business of writing software that people use.

‡ The main commercial product of the ugrep author's company at the time was the gSOAP code generator (it may still be), and that it not only works but makes a reasonably good C and C++ API from WSDL is proof that it is the product of a genius madman. It also allowed you to create both the API and WSDL from a C++-ish header, and both .NET and Java WSDL tools worked perfectly with it. We needed it to work and work it did.

At the time, the generated API was just difficult enough to use that I generated another ~1k lines of code for that project. IIRC, the generated API is sort of handle-based, which requires a slightly different approach than the strict RAII approach we were using. Generating that code was a minor adventure (generating the gSOAP code from the header-ish file, generating doxygen XML from the generated gSOAP code, then generating the wrapper C++ from the doxygen XML).

Psst, don't tell him about emacs and vi(m)...

There are feuds about open source tools all the time. Text editors, Linux distros, shells, programming languages, desktop environments, etc... And ugrep vs ripgrep may be a poster child for C++ vs Rust.

It is not all bad, it drives progress, and it usually stays at a technical level, I've yet to see people killing each others for their choice of command line search tool.

This is so weird, even ripgrep's author is actively seeking conflict in ugrep's new release posts. Not a good colour on both of them.

Any examples? All I see in the recent release post is:

> ugrep is easily one of the if not most featureful grep programs in existence. And it is also fast.

which is burntsushi, ripgrep's author, defending ugrep from someone saying they only focus on performance at the cost of features.

At least how I read it the linked post was ugrep's author seeking conflict, not the ripgrep's.

How is it "seeking conflict" to correct factually wrong claims about your project?