Grepalikes
ack
ag
The Silver surfer[1] is a faster variant on Ack[2], which was a programming-geared variant on grep.
It also ignores files that you've told your versioning to ignore
- .gitignore
- .hgignore
- svn:ignore
You can add further files to ignore in:
- .ignore
- (was .agignore before - deprecated since 0.33, removed in 2.0.0, [3] done to have one file for ag, ripgrep and appparently sift)
.ignore works per directory. you can get global-yet-relative ignores via an alias like:
alias ag='ag --path-to-ignore ~/.ignore'
pt
Similar features to ag.
https://github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher
ucg
UniversalCodeGrep
Built for concurrency.
https://github.com/gvansickle/ucg
ripgrep (rg)
A balance between ag usability and grep speed.
Finite automata regexp implementation, which makes it fast (often faster than ag) though also omits some advanced regexp use.
https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/#pitch
sift
git grep
quote fast - but basically by precompiled indices, so isn't general-purpose tool.