The platinum searcher: ack/ag clone written in Go

github.com

27 points·justinmk··7 comments

Ugh. You're replacing a thing with silver in the tagline, and you're using Go to do it, and you don't go with golden in your own?!

ln -s pt au?

Nice! I love the first-class Windows support. Did you do any effort specifically for that or is it "just" that Go libraries are awesome?

Even console colouring works out of the box, and since that's pretty rotten to get done on Windows [0], I have to assume someone somewhere did a lot of effort for that :-)

[0] https://code.google.com/p/googletest/source/browse/trunk/src...

That file seems to hardcode the list of known TERMs rather than using the termcap. Most specifically it seems to ignore rxvt-unicode and rxvt-unicode-256-color even though they are perfectly capable terminals.

I have no idea what you just said, but I think that it confirms my understanding that doing console colours on Windows is a pain in the buttocks.

I'm amazed that this is faster than ag. If I can confirm that this is indeed the case then I'm going to be switching pretty soon.

Anyone have any insight as to how this was achieved? Ag is fairly well optimized from what I've seen. Is this just the Go runtime being more efficient that libc or some other amazing technical achievement or is this simply a case of pt ignoring more files that Ag by default?

I like ack. Why should I switch?

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