The Silver Searcher is a tool for searching code. It started off as a clone of Ack, but their feature sets have since diverged slightly.
In typical usage, Ag is 5-10x faster than Ack.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- It is an order of magnitude faster than ack.
- Uses Pthreads to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and search files in parallel.
- Files are
mmap()ed instead of read into a buffer. - Literal string searching uses Boyer-Moore strstr.
- Regex searching uses PCRE’s JIT compiler.
- Ag calls
pcre_study()before executing the same regex on every file. - Instead of calling
fnmatch()on every pattern in your ignore files, non-regex patterns are loaded into arrays and binary searched.
- It ignores file patterns from your .gitignore and .hgignore.
- If there are files in your source repo you don’t want to search, just add their patterns to a .ignore file.
- The command name is 33% shorter than ack, and all keys are on the home row!
Website: geoff.greer.fm/ag
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Geoff Greer
License: Apache License 2.0
The Silver Searcher is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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