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Comment by euank | Hacker News Reader

I personally use the silver searcher[0], also known as ag, which is .gitignore aware and I find quite quick and useful.

In fact, ag references git-grep in its readme while this blogpost makes no mention of ag. I suspect the author just doesn't know about ag or doesn't want to install an additional less-standard package... I personally find it worth the installation.

[0]: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

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> I suspect the author just doesn't know about ag

Actually, the author uses Windows, and ag is a pain to build on Windows. pt[1] (written in go) has drop-in builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

[1] https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher

The main reason for poor windows support is that I didn't own a copy of windows until two months ago. There is a windows fork of ag, but it doesn't compile on *nix: https://github.com/kjk/the_silver_searcher

That said, pt is pretty cool. If that's what works for you, keep using it.

Thanks for that... I am a big fan of ag at work but I had trouble making it work on cygwin at home. This should solve that problem :)

This post was written in Aug 2011. I believe ag wasn't publicly released till Dec 2011.

http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-...

There's also an .agignore file which can be in your project folder or in your home directory for systemwide ignores.

Yep, just came here to note ag. ag is fantastic and I have it installed everywhere I might need to grep a tree that's not in git. (ag's author notes that git grep is usually faster, if you're lucky enough to in fact be grepping a git repo.)

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