Say goodbye to grep

ack is a famous code search tool to replace grep (in a lot of use cases): https://beyondgrep.com/why-ack/

Now there is something even better. There is ag aka The Silver Searcher: ggreer/the_silver_searcher It is like ack, but faster.

Why not just grep?

• Hella fast. Like really really fast. It is beautifully optimized C.
• It ignores files from .gitignore

Instead of doing this with grep:

grep -R --exclude-dir=node_modules 'foobar' /path/to/your/code

You can just do (if you have node_modules in your .gitignore):

ag foobar /path/to/your/code

You can also ignore folders with this option:

ag --ignore file_or_folder_name_to_ignore /path/to/your/code