Install the_silver_searcher with Homebrew, apk, dnf, MacPorts, pacman, winget, chocolatey, scoop

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• ag

Project history

Ag belongs to the generation of developer tools that tried to replace recursive grep with project-aware, ignore-file-aware code search. Its README credits Ack as the predecessor and says that without Ack, Ag would not exist.

The project gained identity through performance work. The README reports benchmark results where Ag found the same results as Ack while searching far less data because it respected git, hg, and ignore files; it also documents implementation choices such as pthreads, mmap, Boyer-Moore literal search, and PCRE JIT support.

Greer's official page provides signed release tarballs and links to performance graphs across releases, which reflects the project's longstanding emphasis on measurable speed rather than only feature breadth.

Adoption history

Ag became broadly packaged across Unix-like systems. The README documents Homebrew and MacPorts on macOS; apt, yum, dnf, emerge, pacman, zypper, Nix, and other Linux paths; BSD packages; and Windows package routes including winget, Chocolatey, MSYS2, and Cygwin.

The Homebrew input mirrors that broad adoption with packages recorded for Alpine, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Fedora/DNF, MacPorts, Arch, Scoop, and winget. That distribution spread is a strong signal that Ag became a common developer workstation dependency rather than a single-ecosystem utility.

How it is used

Developers use `ag` to recursively search source trees while automatically respecting `.gitignore`, `.hgignore`, and project-specific `.ignore` files. The README also documents editor integrations for Vim, Emacs, and TextMate, showing its role as both a shell command and an editor backend.

Ag was commonly used as a faster ack replacement before ripgrep became dominant in many setups. Its attraction was a short command name, parallel search, ignore-file awareness, and easy installation through the package manager already used on the workstation.

Why package nerds care

The Silver Searcher is a classic package-nerd tool because the package name, executable name, and cultural name differ: Homebrew installs `the_silver_searcher`, but users type `ag`, the chemical symbol for silver. That naming quirk is part of its lore.

It also marks an important step in the code-search lineage from grep to ack to ag to ripgrep. The README itself points users to Ack, git-grep, fzf, ripgrep, and Sack, making the project a hub in the modern command-line search ecosystem.

Timeline

• 2012: README links document performance work such as benchmarking revisions and adding pthreads.
• 2014: README links to Greer's invitation for contributors to pair on Ag 1.0.
• 2010s: Official page publishes signed release tarballs through version 2.2.0.
• 2020: README notes winget as a Windows package-manager path while describing it as beta at that time.

Related projects

• Ack is the direct predecessor named by the official page and README.
• The README lists ack.vim, Exuberant Ctags, git-grep, fzf, ripgrep, and Sack as related tools users might like.
• The Platinum Searcher is a later related code-search tool that explicitly compares itself to ag.

Sources

• Official README: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher#readme
• Official performance page linked from project page: https://geoff.greer.fm/ag/speed/
• Official project page: https://geoff.greer.fm/ag/
• source_facts.package-manager