Linux tools: silver searcher

After my previous post about ack a Twitter follower, Nick Morrott, pointed out that there is a potentially better tool than ack.

For those who don’t know, ‘ag’ is the executable name for a tool called the “Silver Searcher“. The executable is called ‘ag’ due to the chemical symbol for Silver. This is a clone of ack but instead of using Perl it is written in C. And it is fast, crazy fast. In my quick non-scientific tests it is 3-4x faster than ack on the codebases I use.

I used ag a long time ago and completely forgot about it, so big thanks for Nick for reminding me that it exists. I’ll be switching to it for my daily usage. This is one reason why I write these blogs, there are definitely better tools out there than the ones I use!