petdance

8 ms·

31.
by petdance 9y ago
I'm going to be making a new chart that is more about features than command flags. I'll include the licensing information. Thanks. https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/issues/80
32.
by petdance 9y ago
There's a link to the issue tracker right there at the top of the page.
33.
by petdance 9y ago
ack will always be slower than ripgrep, but it shouldn't be as slow as it is in burntsushi's tests. In his tests, he's showing run times where ack takes 25x as long to run as ripgrep, and ack shouldn't be NEARLY that sl
34.
by petdance 9y ago
I added smartcase in ack because I used it constantly in vim. I don't normally want to have to remember if the function I'm searching for is "format_ISBN" or "format_isbn", for example. Some languages (PHP) a
35.
by petdance 9y ago
Author here. I don't know about "The Secret" other than it being an Oprah thing, what, ten years ago? Abundance vs. scarcity has nothing to do with “Believe and you shall receive... somehow”. Scarcity thinking means that you
36.
by petdance 9y ago
ack has a configuration file, and it's extremely flexible, including the ability to check shebang lines. If you have a shell script without an extension, it's the only way to know what language it is.
37.
by petdance 9y ago
It's going to be two pages ultimately. If you're comparing features, you don't care about the how. Right now we're keeping all the data in a JSON file that we massage into a chart. Massaging it into a true feature comp
38.
by petdance 9y ago
Good to know. I've been considering dropping ACK_OPTIONS, and this just might put me over the edge.
39.
by petdance 9y ago
I've updated the phrasing so it says "Re-enable case-sensitive search over case-insensitve or smart-case search".
40.
by petdance 9y ago
No, the chart doesn't compare speed. Lord knows there have been many comparisons of the speeds of grep-alikes, but nobody has written up a comparison of features. For me, raw speed is not as important as a rich feature set to support
41.
by petdance 9y ago
ack does the "limit by a certain filetype", and it also lets you define your own file types or extend existing ones. ag does not.
42.
by petdance 9y ago
ack does not look in .gitignore files at all.
43.
by petdance 9y ago
Author here. Yes, that's really what it is. I need to make one that's actually feature comparison more than phrasebook. We're also working on a GNU grep vs. POSIX grep vs. BSD grep phrasebook.
44.
by petdance 9y ago
What kind of OS are you running that Perl isn't installed already?
45.
by petdance 9y ago
> He's made the world a better place for many Most importantly, that doesn't mean he's going to make Google a better place, or that his skills will be usable at Google.
46.
by petdance 9y ago
It's probably more correct to say "Nobody complained in a public forum for 6 years."
47.
by petdance 9y ago
There's having fun, and then there's violating the Principle of Least Astonishment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
48.
by petdance 9y ago
> they like Perl and ack and occasionally use some of that fancy superpower. I, on the other hand, lack that experience One of the things I'm working on right now is a cookbook that will ship with ack 3, currently about thisclose f
49.
by petdance 9y ago
You're very welcome. I'm glad it's made things easier. git grep, ag, rg, whatever: Just use whatever makes you happiest. It's interesting how git grep makes the ack feature of "ignore your VCS dirs" not so im
50.
by petdance 9y ago
Thanks for the clarifications. I was under the impression that Rust required a lot of tough infrastructure. I'm glad to see that ripgrep lets you define your own types. That ripgrep does it with globbing vs. the ways that ack allows
51.
by petdance 9y ago
What do you mean by a "invested in a Perl workflow"? Do you mean "comfortable with Perl regexes"? Other reasons that you may want to use ack: * You want to define your own filetypes * You want to define your own output
52.
by petdance 9y ago
> they automatically skip binary and VCS-ignored files If it does less work, and takes less time, then isn't that faster?
53.
by petdance 9y ago
Creator of ack here. The three biggest reasons to use grepalikes is not necessarily the time to execute the search, but 1) The reduced amount of typing. It's much faster to type "ack foo --ruby" than it is to type "find
54.
by petdance 10y ago
I have to switch back and forth between ack and grep all the time. Sometimes I use ack, sometimes I use grep. I wrote ack, but I've never stopped using grep, and ack has never been intended as a replacement for grep. For most of the
55.
by petdance 10y ago
Don't worry. The most common switches are the same between ack and grep: -i, --ignore-case -v, --invert-match -w, --word-regexp -l, --files-with-matches -L, --files-without-matches -o -m, --max-count=NUM
56.
by petdance 12y ago
> after all project/bin/foo (executable) might be a python or perl or whatever script -- not just a binary file. That's one of the big features of ack that the find/grep combo can't replicate is checking the sheb
57.
by petdance 12y ago
They solve different problems. Ctags and cscope index a corpus of source code, usually tied into another tool, like Ctrl-] in vim. ack searches the files every time.
58.
by petdance 12y ago
There's a list of other tools for search source code besides ack at http://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/ , including other grepalikes and indexing tools like ctags and cscope. I suggest that you need not limit yoursel
59.
by petdance 12y ago
> I think it's important not to throw grep away Exactly. There's no reason that you can't have grep AND ack AND ag in your toolbox to choose from.
60.
by petdance 12y ago
ag is not "exactly like" ack. There are features that ack has that ag has chosen not to replicate. ack is also more portable. That's not a knock on ag at all, and if ag fits your needs, then by all means use it.

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