Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep | Hacker News Reader

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

linux.die.net

23 pointsthefox13 comments

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.

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

Sold!

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

This one is fast. Really fast.

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

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

I'll take this opportunity to thank you for this productivity enhancing great piece of software!

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!

Ack uses the same git/hg/svn-ignore heuristic.

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.

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

Alright, but where is the advantage of it?

The name is one letter shorter. Here are some other advantages listed: http://beyondgrep.com/why-ack/

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".

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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