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sharkdp
fd
Rust2017–2026
sharkdp / fd

fd

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

77Distinct people
89Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
45.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

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

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Been using ripgrep for a while now, I love it. One other Rust tool people might find useful is fd (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) which is similar to find.

VohuMana used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year89 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-06-08 08:04:19 UTC to 2026-08-28 16:56:03 UTC.

0510152017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 4 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 0 submissions, 13 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC541
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13013
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404

What Hacker News says

89 sources
Every time such a list is posted, it tends to generate a lot of debate, but I do think there is at least 2 tools that are really a good addition to any terminal : `fd`: first I find that the argument semantic is way better than `find`, but that is more a bonus than a real killer feature. Now, it being much, much faster than `find` on most setup, I would consider a valuable feature. But the killer feature for me is the `-x` argument. It allows calling another command on the individual search result, which `find` can also do with `xargs` and co. But `fd` provide a very nice placeholder syntax[0], which remove the need to mess with `basename` and co. to parse the filename and make a new one, and it executes in parallel. For example, it makes converting a batch of image a fast and readable one line : `fd -e jpg -x cjxl {} {.}.jxl` `rg` a.k.a
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`ripgrep` : Honestly it is just about the speed. It is so much faster than `grep` when searching through a directory, it opens up a lot of possibilities. Like, searching for `isLoading` on my frontend (~3444 files) is instant with rg (less than 0.10s) but takes a few minutes with grep. But there is one other thing that I really like with `ripgrep` and that I think should be a feature of any "modern" CLI tool : It can format its output in JSON. Not that I am a big fan of JSON, but at least it is a well-defined exchange format. "Classic" CLI tool just output in a "human-readable" format which might just happen to be "machine-readable" if you mess with `awk` and `sed` enough. But it makes piping and scripting just that much more annoying and error & bug prone. Being able to output json, `jq` it and feed it to the next tool is so much better and feel like the missing chain of the terminal. The big advantage of the CLI is that it is composable and scriptable by default. But it is missing a common exchange format to pass data, and this is what you have to wrangle with a lot of time when scripting. Having json, never mind all the gripes I have with this format, really join everything together. Also, honorable mention for `zellij` which I find to be a much saner UX-wise alternative to `tmux`, and the `helix` text editor, which for me is neo-vim but with, again, a better UX (especially for beginner) and a lot more battery included feature while remaining faster (IMEX) than nvim with matching plugin for feature-parity. EDIT: I would also add difftastic ( https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic ) which is a syntax aware diff tool. I don't use it much, but it does makes some diff so so much easier to read. [0] https://github.com/sharkdp/fd?tab=readme-ov-file#placeholder...
In Modern Linux tools
It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy. An example: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/ The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic. The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github
Read the rest
.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?
In Apple's Software Quality Crisis
And the "Worse is Better" follows some good design principles, but in a very twisted way: the program is designed to minimize the effort the programmer needs to write it. Implementation simplicity meant one important thing: Unix could be quickly developed and iterated. When Unix was still new, this was a boon and Unix grew rapidly, but at one point backward compatibility had to be maintained and we remained with a lot of cruft. Unfortunately, since implementation simplicity and development speed nearly always took precedence over everything else, this cruft could be quite painful. If you look at the C standard library and traditional Unix tools, they are generally quite user hostile. The simple tools like "cat" and "wc" are simple enough to make them useful, but most of the tools have severe shortcomings, either in the interface, lack of
Read the rest
critical features or their entire design. For example: 1. ls was never really designed to output directory data in a way that can be parsed by other programs. It is so bad that "Don't parse ls" became a famous warning for shell script writers[1]. 2. find has a very weird expression language that is hard to use or remember. It also never really heard about the "do one thing well" part of Unix philosophy and decided that "be mediocre at multiple things" is a better approach. Of course, finding files with complex queries and executing complex actions as a result is not an easy task. But find makes even the simplest things harder than they should be. A good counterexample is "fd"[2]. You want to find that has a "foo" somewhere in its name in the current directory and display the path in a friendly manner? fd foo vs find . -name 'foo' -Printf "%P\n". What to find all .py files and run "wc -l" on each of them? fd --extension py --exec wc -l (or "fd -e py -x wc -l" if you like it short). "Find requires you to write find . -name '*.py' -exec wc -l {} ;". I keep forgetting that and have to search the manual every time. Oh, and as a bonus, if you forget to quote your wildcards for find they may (or may not!) be expanded by the shell, and end up giving you completely unexpected results. Great foolproof design. 3. sed is yet another utility which is just too hard to learn. Most people use it as mostly as a regex find-and-replace tool in pipes nowadays, but its regex syntax is quite lacking. This is not entirely sed's fault, since it predates Perl and PCRE which set the modern standard for regular expressions that we expect to more or less work the same everywhere. But it is another example of a tool that badly violates the principles of good design. The Unix Haters Handbook is full of many more examples, but the reality is that Unix won because other OSes could not deliver what their users needed fast enough. Unix even brought some good ideas to the mass market (like pipes) even if the implementation was messy. We now live under the shadow of its legacy, for better or worse. But I don't think we should idolize the Unix philosophy. It is mostly a set of principles ("everything is a file", "everything is text" and "each tool should do one job", "write programs to work together") that was never strictly followed (many things in UNIX are not files, many commands do multiple jobs, most commands don't interact nicely with each other unless you just care about opaque lines). But most importantly, the Unix philosophy doesn't extend much beyond designing composable command line tools that handle line-oriented text for power users. [1] https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs [2] https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
In We are destroying software
Perhaps interesting (for some) to note that hyperfine is from the same author as at least a few other "ne{w,xt} generation" command line tools (that could maybe be seen as part of "rewrite it in Rust", but I don't want to paint the author with a brush they disagree with!!): fd (find alternative; https://github.com/sharkdp/fd), bat ("supercharged version of the cat command"; https://github.com/sharkdp/bat), and hexyl (hex viewer; https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl). (And certainly others I've missed!) Pointing this out because I myself appreciate comments that do this. For myself, `fd` is the one most incorporated into my own "toolbox" -- used it this morning prior to seeing this thread on hyperfine! So, thanks for all that, sharkdp if you're reading! Ok, end OT-ness.
In Hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool

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