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ag

The Silver Searcher - a fast code search tool inspired by ack

Search & Filter linuxmacoswindows C Apache-2.0

Description

ag (The Silver Searcher) is a text search utility targeted at source code. It skips versioning system data directories and is inspired by ack, but significantly faster. It searches code roughly 3-5x faster than ack by using parallelism and ignoring files from .gitignore.

AI Summary

Fast code search tool that is significantly faster than ack and grep

Capabilities

  • + Search source code files very quickly using parallelism
  • + Respect .gitignore and .hgignore rules
  • + Skip binary files and VCS directories automatically
  • + Support Perl-compatible regular expressions

Use When

  • You need fast text search through source code
  • You want a faster alternative to ack or grep

Avoid When

  • x You want the fastest possible search (use ripgrep instead)

Related Tools

View AGENTS.md for ag