ag

Additional Notes

ag, The Silver Searcher, is a fast recursive search tool for code and text. It honors many ignore files and is usually faster than traditional recursive grep on large projects.

Use it when you need quick project-wide search from the terminal.

Syntax

ag [options] pattern [path...]

Parameters

• pattern: Text or regular expression to search for.
• path: File or directory to search.
• options: Matching, output, and file-selection controls.

Common Options

• -i: Case-insensitive search.
• -w: Match whole words.
• -l: Show only matching filenames.
• -L: Show only files that do not match.
• -Q: Treat the pattern as a literal string.
• --hidden: Search hidden files.
• --ignore PATTERN: Ignore matching paths.

Examples

ag "TODO"

Search the current project.

ag -i "login" ./src

Search case-insensitively in src.

ag -Q "user.name"

Search for a literal string containing regex punctuation.

ag -l "main"

Print only matching file names.

Practical Notes

• ag is great for interactive code search, but rg is more common in many modern setups.
• Use -Q when searching for literal punctuation-heavy strings.
• Ignore rules can hide files you expected to search; try --hidden or review ignore files.