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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by _yy on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @04:59AM (#10893296)
The Silver Searcher, or ag: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Designed as a replacement for all of the use cases of Ack. Is even faster.

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by ggreer on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:15AM (#10893361)
I'll engage in some expectation management: ag doesn't cover all uses of Ack. I made ag because I loved Ack, but it wasn't fast enough for my needs. For the features of Ack that I use, ag is interchangeable. For features I don't use... not so much. Also, since the release of Ack 2.0, some behaviors and command line options have differed slightly.

If you want to know why ag is so fast, there's a summary in the GitHub README.[1] I've also written a few blog posts on the subject.[2]

1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#how-is-it-so-f...

2. http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/#related-posts

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by jzzskijj on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @06:05AM (#10893512)
I'll take this opportunity to thank you for this productivity enhancing great piece of software!
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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by gedsic on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:13AM (#10893341)
* The command name is 33% shorter than ack, and all keys are on the home row!

Sold!

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by sirn on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:14AM (#10893351)
There's also The Platinum Searcher (pt) which add support for searching SHIFT_JIS and EUC-JP files and about as fast as ag.

https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by jonathonf on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @06:24AM (#10893569)
I'm not sure how valid the comparison benchmark is:

  Ack and Ag found the same results, but Ag was 34x faster
  (3.2 seconds vs 110 seconds). My ~/code directory is about
  8GB. Thanks to git/hg/svn-ignore, Ag only searched 700MB of that.
Searching less data definitely is going to take less time!
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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by majewsky on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @10:06AM (#10894784)
Ack uses the same git/hg/svn-ignore heuristic.
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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by tobiaswk on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:14AM (#10893352)
This one is fast. Really fast.

It even better than ack. This is very useful on large codebases.

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by makecheck on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @09:32AM (#10894488)
While "would you rather type" examples are OK, I wish more people would learn how to use their shell's short-cuts and trivial scripting.

Whenever you find yourself repeatedly running long and awkward commands that you wish were shorter, you ought to think about converting them into an alias or a script.

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by datalist on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @04:54AM (#10893277)
"Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep."

Alright, but where is the advantage of it?

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by mbel on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @04:59AM (#10893294)
The name is one letter shorter. Here are some other advantages listed: http://beyondgrep.com/why-ack/
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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by datalist on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:05AM (#10893313)
Thanks, though I hope that statement came with a pinch of sarcasm ;)

The list reads more like a list of features though than "advantages over grep".

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Re:Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep by Kurtz79 on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:13AM (#10893345)
About the command name length, probably a running joke ?

This is from the feature list of the Silver Searcher, listed above:

"The command name is 33% shorter than ack, and all keys are on the home row!"

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