> And I'd absolutely categorize "use \b instead of \< or \>" as a pretty small difference.
I don't know, to me \b always felt like a bad idea. Start of string (^) and end of string ($) make sense as different symbols, I'm not aware of people asking for a single "boundary of string" symbol that acts as (^|$), I'm not aware of any realistic use case for it that isn't better written using plain old ^ or $. I feel the same way about \< and \>: in any place where I would otherwise have to write \b I already know whether I'll want "start of word" or "end of word" and it won't make sense to allow the other, but \b forces that to be accepted too.
That said...
> Another question is whether we need to also add the negation of each of \< and \> too, to match \b and \B. (I don't know of any commonly accepted syntax for the negation of \< or \>.)
...the negation of word boundaries clearly has uses, but the negation of \< or \> would be a new invention that would add more incompatibilities between ripgrep and other implementations. As much as I'd be in favour of a negation of \< and \>, I'd be more in favour of something that also works in other implementations, which is the \B that you already have.
Just my personal views. I'm served either way by my locally patched version of ripgrep, I'll assume you know better what the rest of your users want.
I don't know, to me \b always felt like a bad idea. Start of string (^) and end of string ($) make sense as different symbols, I'm not aware of people asking for a single "boundary of string" symbol that acts as (^|$), I'm not aware of any realistic use case for it that isn't better written using plain old ^ or $. I feel the same way about \< and \>: in any place where I would otherwise have to write \b I already know whether I'll want "start of word" or "end of word" and it won't make sense to allow the other, but \b forces that to be accepted too.
That said...
> Another question is whether we need to also add the negation of each of \< and \> too, to match \b and \B. (I don't know of any commonly accepted syntax for the negation of \< or \>.)
...the negation of word boundaries clearly has uses, but the negation of \< or \> would be a new invention that would add more incompatibilities between ripgrep and other implementations. As much as I'd be in favour of a negation of \< and \>, I'd be more in favour of something that also works in other implementations, which is the \B that you already have.
Just my personal views. I'm served either way by my locally patched version of ripgrep, I'll assume you know better what the rest of your users want.