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If you haven't tried https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher yet you're missing out

The progression is grep with a ton of flags (or even find | xargs grep) -> ack -> ag.

ag is faster than ack, automatically understands .gitignore, gives you .agignore as well, and is just a really nice piece of software.

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ag has issues with .gitignore, as patterns are not recognized properly. The matcher that git uses cannot be included due to licensing (see https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/614).

Does seem like there is hope, as a BSD licensed version exists. My fingers are crossed that this is solved soon :)

inside a git repository I would recommend using `git grep`

ag uses .agignore

I often need to search only on a subset of the files checked in git. Example, I don't search the min.js files but I need them for the deploys.

It would be nice if they could share the same format.

My experience with "ack" was that it seemed great for a few days and then I realized it was silently skipping searching certain files, causing hits to be suppressed, so I stopped trusting it. :-/

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