Personally I find silversearcher (ag) faster, and reinventing standard commandline tools with a collection of other tools is often slower.

One liner shell commands often turn complicated quickly.

ag is often faster when you're using it interactively, replacing "grep -r" (in particular in version controlled dirs). It's also faster in the sense that for interactive use it will often DWYM.

But has too many weird quirks that it can replace grep for data munging. E.g.

    $ ag verb fullform_nn.txt >/tmp/verbs
    ERR: Too many matches in fullform_nn.txt. Skipping the rest of this file.

Man ag says there's a --max-count option. Let's try that.

    $ grep -c verb fullform_nn.txt
    206077
    $ ag --max-count 206077 verb fullform_nn.txt >/tmp/verbs
    ERR: Too many matches in fullform_nn.txt. Skipping the rest of this file.

Wtf? (and running those two commands with "time" gave ag user 0m0.770s while grep had user 0m0.057s)

Did you report it as a bug?

did now https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/483 (though it took me a while to figure out a more precise issue title than "--max-count is taunting me")

I have never used ag, but in most instances where people thought they made a faster grep it is becuase it doesn't handle multibyte encodings correctly.

Have you rerun your tests in the "C" locale?