[piranha]

Well you see... It's in Python, which breaks the deal for me (I despise slow startup). But interactive mode sounds interesting, that's something I'll consider implementing.

[pekk]

By slow startup do you mean 0.01s of wall time? This sounds more like a prejudice than a decision with a strong technical basis.

[piranha]

By slow startup I mean that 0.1s is the fastest small Python program using optparse, os, sys, re will start up on my system (i7 2.0, ssd). Search and replace tool will be slower. I constantly get 0.02s-0.3s results from 'gr' on my small-to-medium repositories (up to ~80k sloc). 'ack' takes more than a second usually.

Also it was written when I had HDD (not SSD) and codebase was on an encrypted image. It made enormous difference to me.

[cfrss]

btw, here is ag, which also looks .xignore files: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

[piranha]

Yes, I've mentioned it in my post. :) It's nice, but it does not perform replaces. I could add .xignore support though.