[anooh]

Wow this is amazing. It's super fast and has a very easy to follow help page, plus the formatting is pretty awesome. I just did a quick benchmark searching for `kthreadd` using grep and ag and it's magnitudes faster than grep. Thank you for sharing this. I hope I can convince the network admins at my workplace to install this tool.

In addition, A+ for the ag's design for `mmap()` ing files instead reading them into a buffer.

Bench marks: Using Grep

```bash $ time grep -Rsn "kthreadd" ... real 0m25.341s user 0m5.738s sys 0m4.074s ```

Using ag: ```bash $ time ag "kthreadd" ...

real 0m2.182s user 0m1.306s sys 0m1.773s ```

[danadam]

> I just did a quick benchmark searching for `kthreadd` using grep and ag and it's magnitudes faster than grep.

I'd be careful with that. You may have just tested the awesomeness of linux caches :-)

Yes, it "looks" magnitudes faster:

  ]$ time grep -Rsn "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m26.895s
  user    0m3.131s
  sys     0m3.151s

  ]$ time ag "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m0.906s
  user    0m1.930s
  sys     0m1.186s

  ]$ time rg "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m0.860s
  user    0m1.756s
  sys     0m1.123s

But wait, somehow grep got magnitutes faster too:

  ]$ time grep -Rsn "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m2.961s
  user    0m1.979s
  sys     0m0.959s

And we can make both ag and rg slower:

  ]# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  ]$ time ag "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m17.761s
  user    0m2.371s
  sys     0m2.728s

  ]# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  ]$ time rg "kthreadd"
  ...
  real    0m19.276s
  user    0m1.859s
  sys     0m3.063s

[asicsp]

I'd suggest ripgrep [0] for even faster results.

[0] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

[capableweb]

ripgrep doesn't seem to just be fast, it has a good set of features compared to the alternatives too! https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/

[jedimind]

I always wondered what the differences between all those mysteriously named search tools are, great resource, thanks for sharing!

[sva_]

Might also want to use FZF as selection interface for the ripgrep results, if applicable.

[einpoklum]

It's Rust-based, though, and is thus difficult to get installed on older systems.

[burntsushi]

Which systems? I have a ten year old laptop it works fine on.