FD vs Ripgrep: Is There a New King of the Command Line?

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Technology

Two action figures facing off.

The Modern CLI Stack

If you are using find and grep in 2025, you are doing it the hard way. The “Rust-ification” of the command line has given us two titans: fd and rg (Ripgrep). But which one should you use for what?

Ripgrep: The King of Content

Ripgrep is for finding text inside files. It is recursively fast because it respects your .gitignore and uses a highly optimized regex engine.

Goal: “Find where I mentioned the variable api_key.”
Command: rg "api_key"

FD: The King of Filenames

FD is a simple, fast alternative to the find command. It’s built for human beings.

Goal: “Find all .js files in my project.”
Command: fd -e js (Instead of find . -name "*.js")

The Showdown: Performance

In almost every benchmark:

fd is roughly 10x-20x faster than find.
rg is roughly 5x-10x faster than grep.

They both use smart defaults: they ignore hidden directories (like .git) and skip binary files by default.

Which One Wins?

It’s not a competition—it’s a partnership. Use fd to find the directory or file, and rg to search for the specific logic inside. Together, they turn a 10-second wait into a 100ms blink.