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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

I had never heard of The Silver Searcher. Thanks! A test search of a huge codebase (Firefox) took 38 seconds with ack, but only 17 with ag! After my page cache had been warmed up, ack then took 10 seconds and ag only took 3. That said, I am using ack 1.96, not ack 2.0.

  $ brew uninstall ack

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It's OK to have two similar tools in your toolbox. When you need the --output option, for example, you use ack. When you want crazy speed, you use ag.

You don't have to choose one over the other. That's why I changed the name from "betterthangrep.com" to "beyondgrep.com". There's no need to have a ranking of "I use this over that."

Ah, you Perl guys and your "there's more than one way to do it". :-) Disclaimer: I'm a Perl guy and I agree.

Also, take a look at http://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/. There are a dozen other tools on there as well that you might well like as much as ack and ag.

An abundance of tools is good.

I've contributed to ag and followed it quite closely. That being said, I still have ack on all my systems because sometimes, being able to just do:

ack --python search-term is REALLY useful.

Turning things around, I often have SQL dumps around, so ack --no-sql is a real lifesaver in my Rails (i.e ruby, coffee, less, shell and whatnot) projects.

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