Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]