An attempt to make something better than ack, which itself is better than grep.

• It searches through code about 3x-5x faster than ack.
• It ignores files matched by patterns in your .gitignore and .hgignore.
• If there are files in your source repo that you don't want to search, just add their patterns to a .agignore file. *cough* extern *cough*
• The binary name is 33% shorter than ack!

• Searching for literals (no regex) uses Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr.
• Files are mmap()ed instead of read into a buffer.
• If you're building with PCRE 8.21 or greater, regex searches use the JIT compiler.
• Ag calls pcre_study() before executing the regex on a jillion files.
• Instead of calling fnmatch() on every pattern in your ignore files, non-regex patterns are loaded into an array and binary searched.

This blog post gives an idea of how I go about improving performance.

Ubuntu 12.04+:

Add the PPA. Make sure you have python-software-properties installed, then:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ggreer/ag
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install the-silver-searcher

If you get the error -bash: /usr/bin/ag: No such file or directory, congratulations, apt managed to install the i386 version on an x86-64 system. To fix this issue, you'll have to apt-get install ia32-libs or apt-get purge the-silver-searcher and build from source.

Gentoo:

emerge the_silver_searcher

OS X:

brew install the_silver_searcher

For debs, rpms, and static builds, see the downloads page.

1. Install PCRE development libraries:
   • Ubuntu: apt-get install -y libpcre3-dev
   • OS X: Install homebrew, then brew install pcre
   • Windows: It's complicated. See this wiki page.
2. Run the build script (which just runs aclocal, automake, etc):
   • ./build.sh
3. Make install:
   • sudo make install

It's pretty stable now. Most changes are new features or minor bug fixes, such as support for named pipes. It's much faster than ack in my benchmarks.

ack -i SOLR ~/cloudkick/reach  2.89s user 0.77s system 97% cpu 3.765 total

ag -i SOLR ~/cloudkick/reach  0.25s user 0.13s system 94% cpu 0.404 total

You can use ag with my fork of the popular ackmate plugin, which lets you use both ack and ag for searching in Textmate. You can also move or delete "~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/PlugIns/AckMate.tmplugin/Contents/Resources/ackmate_ack" and run ln -s /usr/local/bin/ag "~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/PlugIns/AckMate.tmplugin/Contents/Resources/ackmate_ack"

• behave better when matching in files with really long lines
  • maybe say "match found at position X of line N" if line is > 10k chars
• optimizations
  • pthreads. these days it's silly to use only one core
• actually get textmate dir patterns working (this requires ruby regexes. not fun)
• symlink loop detection

• Ack - Better than grep
• AckMate - An ack-powered replacement for TextMate's slow built-in search.
• ack.vim
• Exuberant Ctags - Faster than Ag, but it builds an index beforehand. Good for really big codebases.
• Git-grep - As fast as Ag but only works on git repos.