One thing I miss a little is that ack has the super convenient:

    ack --java "foo"

while with ag you write:

    ag -G"\.java$" "foo"

But yes, ack and ag feel pretty identical except for the speed. Most of the time the speed improvement is irrelevant to me, except sometimes now I'll use ag in my home folder, and it's still fairly snappy.

That was too much typing anyway. When you mostly work with one language something like this is nice (in my case c/c++): alias ack-cpp='ack-grep --type=cpp --type=cc'

I have that aliased to 'cack'. Then ruby is 'rack', python is 'pack', go is 'gack', etc.

(I've never needed to use the rackup "rack" command directly, fortunately, if you do you ought to use a different alias)

> I've never needed to use the rackup "rack" command directly, fortunately, if you do you ought to use a different alias

Or escape alias \rack

or $(which rack)

Hm, I've recently begun using zsh primarily and this trick doesn't work there: zsh lets you know what the alias is... bash will happily find `rack` in your `$PATH` and then run it.

(Presumably because in zsh, `which which` says it's a shell built-in, whereas in bash it finds `/usr/bin/which`, so bash doesn't seem to be caring about your aliases.)

If you have the EQUALS option set (by default it is), you can use =rack instead: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#g_t_00...

Lovely, thanks!

ag has had this for a while now (I'm on version 0.21.0).

nice! i need to pull and recompile!

Judging by this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7710269 I guess ag now supports that, too.

Thanks for the ack tip! Anything else super useful come to mind?

ag is not "exactly like" ack. There are features that ack has that ag has chosen not to replicate. ack is also more portable.

That's not a knock on ag at all, and if ag fits your needs, then by all means use it.

I normally tell people to use ack because it's like grep but faster (owing to it's sensible defaults) ... if I use this I'm worried I might go too fast and travel backwards in time or something.

Give ag a shot, you'll be able to relive the emotions you felt when you switched to ack from grep, but this time you're switching to ag from ack.