Not entirely unserious: "awk" is a good name because it is three characters to type "rg" is better than "grep" because it is two fewer characters type
They're easy to type on a TTY.
grep is from the ed command "g/re/p" which is g (all lines, short for "1,$") /re/ regular expression to search for, "p" to print the lines.
It still works in vi.
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Not entirely unserious: "awk" is a good name because it is three characters to type "rg" is better than "grep" because it is two fewer characters type