Description:

The Silver Searcher is a code searching tool similar to ack,
with a focus on speed.

An attempt to make something better than ack (which itself is better
than grep).

Why use Ag?

- It searches code about 3-5x faster than ack.

- It ignores file patterns from your .gitignore and .hgignore.

- If there are files in your source repository you don't want to
search,just add their patterns to a .ignore file.

* The command name is 33% shorter than ack, and all keys are on the
home row!

How is it so fast?

- Ag uses Pthreads to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and search
files in parallel.

- Files are mmap()ed instead of read into a buffer.

- Literal string searching uses Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr.

- Regex searching uses PCRE's JIT compiler (if Ag is built with
PCRE >=8.21).

- Ag calls pcre_study() before executing the regex on every file.

- Instead of calling fnmatch() on every pattern in your ignore files,
non-regex patterns are loaded into an array and binary searched.