The Best 13 ack Alternatives

  • The Silver Searcher icon

    The Silver Searcher

    Silver Searcher is a code search tool similar to ack that claims to be much faster. It's implemented in C and has some extra features such as ignoring files per .hignore, .gitignore contents.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Linux BSD

  • ripgrep icon

    ripgrep

    ripgrep combines the usability of The Silver Searcher with the raw speed of grep.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux BSD

  • Gawk icon

    Gawk

    The awk utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs with just a few lines of code. Gawk is...

    Free Open Source Linux

  • JREPL.BAT icon

    JREPL.BAT

    Performs a global regular expression search and replace operation on each line of ASCII input from stdin and prints the result to stdout. Serves .

    Free Open Source Windows Wine

  • Baloo icon

    Baloo

    Baloo is not an application, but a daemon to index files. Applications can use the Baloo framework to provide file search results.

    Free Open Source Linux

  • UniversalCodeGrep icon

    UniversalCodeGrep

    UniversalCodeGrep (ucg) is an extremely fast grep-like tool specialized for searching large bodies of source code.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Linux BSD

  • Mawk icon

    Mawk

    mawk is an interpreter for the AWK Programming Language.

    Free Open Source Linux

  • spot icon

    spot

    Tiny ack-style file search utility. All arguments constitute the search text. No need to wrap most searches in double quotes. Short & written in Bash - just find...

    Free Open Source Linux

  • Multi String Search icon

    Multi String Search

    Search multiple strings occurrences simultaneously with the help of this piece of software that comes with support for regular expressions.

    Freemium