As a frequent user of grep/ack for the codebase, ag seems to be a silver bullet, especially for the projects with large codebase. Available in rpm repositories.

What’s so great about Ag?

  • It is an order of magnitude faster than ack.
  • It ignores file patterns from your .gitignore and .hgignore.
  • If there are files in your source repo you don’t want to search, just add their patterns to a .ignore file. (cough *.min.js cough)
  • The command name is 33% shorter than ack, and all keys are on the home row!