The Silver Searcher (often referred to as ag) is a fast, open-source command-line code-searching tool, designed as a faster alternative to ack, with a focus on programming-related searches and integration with ignore files. 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 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.

Features

  • High-speed recursive searching through directories and code files
  • Honors .gitignore, .hgignore, and custom .ignore files by default
  • Supports multiple output formats and control via many grep-like options
  • Editor integrations available for Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, etc.
  • Cross‑platform compatibility including UNIX-like systems and Windows
  • Free and open-source under Apache‑2.0 license

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License

Apache License V2.0

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Additional Project Details

Operating Systems

Linux, Mac, Windows

Programming Language

C

Related Categories

C Software Development Software

Registered

2025-08-12