The Silver Searcher

The Silver Searcher

The Silver Searcher, also known as ag, is a code searching tool designed to be a faster alternative to grep. It ignores file patterns from ignored files and git history for faster searching.
The Silver Searcher image
code-search faster-grep ignore-files

The Silver Searcher: Fast Code Searching Tool

Code searching tool designed to be a faster alternative to grep, ignoring file patterns from ignored files and git history for faster searching

What is The Silver Searcher?

The Silver Searcher, also known as ag, is an open source command line code searching tool designed as a faster alternative to grep. It works on multiple platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux.

Some of the key features of The Silver Searcher include:

  • Very fast search of code, much faster than grep in some cases
  • Ignores .gitignore and other ignore files for faster project searching
  • Supports regular expressions for complex queries
  • Searches specific file types only, like .js files or .py files
  • parallel command for utilizing multiple cores during search
  • Works across platforms like Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

If you work with large codebases or text files, The Silver Searcher can greatly speed up searching through directories and providing a grep-like interface for filtering search queries. It's one of the most commonly used command line search utilities by developers and power users.

The Silver Searcher Features

Features

  1. Fast search speed
  2. Ignores .gitignore and other ignore files
  3. Support for regex and literal searches
  4. Colored search results
  5. Parallel search across directories
  6. Portable across platforms

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Much faster than grep

Clean and simple interface

Easy installation

Lightweight and low resource usage

Actively maintained and updated

Cons

Less flexible than grep

Limited to code searching

Fewer advanced features than grep


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