Same experience here, started with ack and switched to ag and then to rg for speed. I've found them roughly equivalent in functionality, but for those who need specific features here's a link to a feature comparison table:

https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

That table is quite out of date for ripgrep, which has added a number of features. See: https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/issues/97

Thanks for ripgrep, I use it daily and was recently going through the source code to learn how to build production quality Rust apps! (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)

Pretty sure that rg is a successor to ag, so most people who use `ag` are just ones who haven't heard of `rg` yet.

Well, there's no true hierarchy/succession order but rg was written after ag was.

Yes, this is true, although ripgrep is more of a hybrid than ag is. ag has numerous problems with being treated as a normal `grep` tool, where as ripgrep does not. (Although, to be clear, ripgrep is not POSIX compatible.)