I don’t know if I’ve mentioned “ack” before — it’s been my favorite tool for searching code for a while (it’s better than grep, because it’s fairly speedy because it knows how to search only files that are code and how to ignore a lot of cruft plus it does nice output with coloring, paging, etc.).

Anyway, I just found an even better tool:

https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

It’s more or less a drop-in replacement for “ack”; but it’s written in C (“ack” is Perl) and it’s faster. Looks like this:

Screen Shot of ag (the silver searcher)

And you can use it in your favorite editor probably:

https://github.com/leonid-shevtsov/SearchInProject_SublimeText2
https://github.com/rking/ag.vim
https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim