The Silver Searcher

The Silver Searcher, also known as Ag, is a clone of Ack written by Geoff Greer in C for speed. Ack is quite slow on large codebases since it uses Perl. I found Ag to be significantly faster on my code and switched to it.

Installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt install silversearcher-ag

Using it is similar to Ack:

$ ag foobar

To add a certain file to be ignored, add it to .agignore:

# This is ~/.agignore
someuselessfilename

Tried with: Ag 0.19.2 and Ubuntu 14.04