I held out on grep and find for a long time, mostly out of loyalty. They're on every machine, they've worked for thirty years, and learning a replacement felt like effort spent on a solved problem. But I've now caught myself typing rg on a fresh server, getting "command not found", and feeling genuinely put out. That's how you know a tool has won: when its absence is an irritation.
The speed is the headline, and ripgrep is fast, but speed isn't actually why I switched. It's that it respects .gitignore by default. Searching a repo no longer means wading through node_modules and build artefacts. The thing I want is the thing it finds. find . -name versus fd pattern is the same story: sensible defaults, readable syntax, and output you don't have to squint at.
There's a small pang of guilt in it. grep taught me how text search works and I'll always be able to fall back to it. But "able to fall back to it" is exactly where it now lives, in the same drawer as the things I keep for emergencies and otherwise leave alone. The old tools aren't bad. They're just no longer first.