The \< and \> escape sequences correspond to "left word boundary" and "right word boundary," respectively. They are more specific variants of \b.

There was a request to add them to ripgrep, but in reality, this is more a request for the regex engine itself.

It's not clear whether these are worthwhile things to add, but they are present in other regex engines. There's a secondary question of whether their negation should be support too, although I don't think that's a common thing.

Since unrecognized escape sequences produce a syntax error today, these can be added in a backwards compatible way at any time.