The Search Wars - grep vs ack vs ag

Developers should be constantly searching and refining their toolkit. Knowing the right tool to use for the job is an important aspect of being productive. Here are three competing ways to search using the command line.

grep

grep is a tried and true UNIX command that has been around for decades. It's lightweight, fast, and successfully does the job of quickly searching. grep is a command line utility that every developer should become familiar with. While grep is great, there are a few alternatives that offer some advantages.

ack

Why use it?

For one, ack has 25% fewer characters than grep, typing win! ack is designed for developers and is best suited for searching code files. It is faster than grep because it will ignore common source control files like .git and subversion source control directories.

How to install for OSX?

Use homebrew:

    brew install ack

How to use?

Here is a simple usage. The results are very clean and even come with highlighting.

ag

Why use it?

Ag contains 33% fewer characters than ack! It's also an order of magnitude faster than ack because of it's written in C and is able to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. This as well as a number of other performance enhancements described on the GitHub page.

How to install for OSX?

Use homebrew:

    brew install the_silver_searcher

How to use?

Very similar usage as ack.

I have to admit sometimes I still use sublime for regex pattern matching, but the above utilities are good, reliable, and fast options that every developer should have in their toolkit.