When comparing The Silver Searcher vs ack, the Slant community recommends The Silver Searcher for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop search tools for Linux?” The Silver Searcher is ranked 2nd while ack is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose The Silver Searcher is:
The Silver Searcher is lightning fast.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Speed
The Silver Searcher is lightning fast.
Pro Idiot proof
"ag searchterm" - it's that simple in its purest form.
Pro Support VCS ignore files
Ag can speed up by ignoring files matched by pattern in ".agignore" (deprecated), ".ignore" (since ag-v0.33.0), and VCS ignore files (.gitignore, .git/info/exclude, .hgignore, svn:ignore).
Pro Good overview of results
Grouped by file, highlighted with background color, linenumbers by default
Pro Search term highlighting in results
ack will highlight parts of each row that match the search expression.