friends VS the_silver_searcher

This is maybe slightly different than what you’re looking for, but my project Friends[1] is a journaling CLI that I also use to keep track of people’s addresses and contact info (via the “notes” feature).

[1] https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends

"The Silver Searcher" is a program written in the _same_ "unsafe" language as grep

This is obviously not analogous to Rust evangelism that targets projects written in C

The author claims the program is a clone of ack; ack is written in a "safe" language

https://geoff.greer.fm/ag/

https://beyondgrep.com/

Silver Searcher GitHub

It's weird that the_silver_searcher, also known as `ag` [1] is not mentioned in benchmarks, which is also implemented in C.

I wonder why...

[1] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

There are other CLI search tools for code: grep, ripgrep, etc. or actual search tools (Sourcegraph, Github, IDEs), but I always reach for Silver Searcher/Ag. Ag is a code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster. The syntax is pretty good and it’s very helpful when I just want something basic such as when I’m just looking for the string Config (I don’t use complex regex).By the way fzf.zsh, combines ag with fzf to do instant full text search recursively over the current directory, and then pops you into vim at that exact file line.

View on GitHub

If you have trouble finding it among the other stuff happening in the server log, well, so do I! I recommend learning how to programmatically search through your terminal output. Providing a universal method for this is challenging because various tools and terminal emulators implement this functionality differently. Another option would be to use tools like grep or the_silver_searcher (a favorite of mine) to search the file where your dev logs are written to. This file is located at log/development.log in a Rails project.

Some of the examples below use ag, but could just as well use grep or equivalent.

Why guess when [there are installation instructions for various platforms on the README](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#installing)?

Also, although it may not be easy to remember, is this really a problem in practice given the installation count in most contexts is one? If there's a context where it's installed regularly, that's a one-time addition to an install script, Dockerfile, etc. in my experience. Do you have a situation that isn't amenable to that?