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The Silver Searcher

A code searching tool similar to ack, with a focus on speed.

Build Status

Floobits Status

#ag on Freenode

Do you know C? Want to improve ag? I invite you to pair with me.

What's so great about Ag?

Ag is quite stable now. Most changes are new features, minor bug fixes, or performance improvements. It's much faster than Ack in my benchmarks:

ack test_blah ~/code/  104.66s user 4.82s system 99% cpu 1:50.03 total

ag test_blah ~/code/  4.67s user 4.58s system 286% cpu 3.227 total

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/ignore, Ag only searched 700MB of that.

There are also graphs of performance across releases.

How is it so fast?

I've written several blog posts showing how I've improved performance. These include how I added pthreads, wrote my own scandir(), benchmarked every revision to find performance regressions, and profiled with gprof and Valgrind.

Installing

macOS

brew install the_silver_searcher

or

port install the_silver_searcher

Linux

BSD

Windows

Building from source

Building master

  1. Install dependencies (Automake, pkg-config, PCRE, LZMA):

    • macOS:

        brew install automake pkg-config pcre xz
      

      or

        port install automake pkgconfig pcre xz
      
    • Ubuntu/Debian:

        apt-get install -y automake pkg-config libpcre3-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev
      
    • Fedora:

        yum -y install pkgconfig automake gcc zlib-devel pcre-devel xz-devel
      
    • CentOS:

        yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
        yum -y install pcre-devel xz-devel zlib-devel
      
    • openSUSE:

        zypper source-install --build-deps-only the_silver_searcher
      
    • Windows: It's complicated. See this wiki page.

  2. Run the build script (which just runs aclocal, automake, etc):

     ./build.sh
    

    On Windows (inside an msys/MinGW shell):

     make -f Makefile.w32
    
  3. Make install:

     sudo make install
    

Building a release tarball

GPG-signed releases are available here.

Building release tarballs requires the same dependencies, except for automake and pkg-config. Once you've installed the dependencies, just run:

./configure
make
make install

You may need to use sudo or run as root for the make install.

Editor Integration

Vim

You can use Ag with ack.vim by adding the following line to your .vimrc:

let g:ackprg = 'ag --nogroup --nocolor --column'

or:

let g:ackprg = 'ag --vimgrep'

Which has the same effect but will report every match on the line.

Emacs

You can use ag.el as an Emacs front-end to Ag. See also: helm-ag.

TextMate

TextMate users can use Ag with my fork of the popular AckMate plugin, which lets you use both Ack and Ag for searching. If you already have AckMate you just want to replace Ack with Ag, move or delete "~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/PlugIns/AckMate.tmplugin/Contents/Resources/ackmate_ack" and run ln -s /usr/local/bin/ag "~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/PlugIns/AckMate.tmplugin/Contents/Resources/ackmate_ack"

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