From your experience have you felt these people had researched their reasonings for the rewrites extensively prior. Or did they discover these improvements along the way sort of, simply an off shoot of simply being a hobby when wanting to build their tooling to define existing flows/actions

[–] snaggen 2 points 1 year ago

That varies quite a lot... but in general, the small tools seems to start as someone adding color and bling, possibly some nice things like automatic pager (like in bat). Still often nice additions though. For larger stuff like rg and gitoxide the authors seems to have done quite a lot of research and are really experts in their field. You don't improve grep and git by accident.