4 ms·

Much as I've loved ack, I'd be all in favor of a replacement that was really significantly better. That said, the readme there lists five reasons why Silver Se

by colomon 15y ago

Much as I've loved ack, I'd be all in favor of a replacement that was really significantly better. That said, the readme there lists five reasons why Silver Searcher is better than ack. Two of them are nonsense (who cares what language it's written in, or same-order-of-magnitude differences in how big the executables are?), two sound like they would be pretty trivial changes to ack, and the last is a significant speed improvement. But then you read further down the readme, and it says the current development state is somewhere between "Runs" and "Behaves correctly". Isn't it kind of premature to be bragging about how fast you are before your code actually behaves correctly? Also, it makes me wonder how much of the speed increase is based on the easy changes filtering out more files...

Garoof 15y ago
(who cares what language it's written in, or same-order-of-magnitude differences in how big the executables are?) That last reason there is about the length of the filename, not about the size of the file. I don't think anyone's supposed to really care, no.
- colomon 15y ago
  Oh! Well, then that's another for the trivial to make ack do it list... :)
AngryParsley 15y ago
The list is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Also I haven't updated the README in a while. While ag certainly isn't as stable or feature-rich as ack, I have fixed bugs in ag that are still in ack. https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220 https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220 for example.
- petdance 15y ago
  Hey, if you've got a solution for it, I'd love to hear.
  - AngryParsley 15y ago
    I commented on the issue: https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220#issuecomment-5128415 https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220#issuecomment-5128...
mturmon 15y ago
Not arguing with your basic point, which is good, but when the developer says "The binary name is 33% shorter than ack!", he's referring to the difference between typing "ag" vs. typing "ack". Not the size in bytes of the executable. It's a little inside joke, because one of the points in favor of "ack", offered jokingly years ago by its developer, is that "ack" is 25% fewer letters to type compared to "grep". (This feature is still there as point #10 in http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/ http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/, now not offered 100% jokingly.)
- petdance 15y ago
  It's a joke but not. The less typing you have to do, the better. Less typing means fewer mistakes and less time waiting for the search to start. Defaults matter. ack is all about having sensible defaults for your most common uses.

by colomon 15y ago

Garoof 15y ago

(who cares what language it's written in, or same-order-of-magnitude differences in how big the executables are?) That last reason there is about the length of the filename, not about the size of the file. I don't think anyone's supposed to really care, no.

colomon 15y ago
Oh! Well, then that's another for the trivial to make ack do it list... :)

AngryParsley 15y ago

The list is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Also I haven't updated the README in a while. While ag certainly isn't as stable or feature-rich as ack, I have fixed bugs in ag that are still in ack. https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220 https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220 for example.

petdance 15y ago
Hey, if you've got a solution for it, I'd love to hear.
- AngryParsley 15y ago
  I commented on the issue: https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220#issuecomment-5128415 https://github.com/petdance/ack/issues/220#issuecomment-5128...

mturmon 15y ago

Not arguing with your basic point, which is good, but when the developer says "The binary name is 33% shorter than ack!", he's referring to the difference between typing "ag" vs. typing "ack". Not the size in bytes of the executable. It's a little inside joke, because one of the points in favor of "ack", offered jokingly years ago by its developer, is that "ack" is 25% fewer letters to type compared to "grep". (This feature is still there as point #10 in http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/ http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/, now not offered 100% jokingly.)

petdance 15y ago
It's a joke but not. The less typing you have to do, the better. Less typing means fewer mistakes and less time waiting for the search to start. Defaults matter. ack is all about having sensible defaults for your most common uses.