When comparing The Silver Searcher vs sift, the Slant community recommends The Silver Searcher for most people. In the question“What are the best command-line tools for searching plain-text data using regular expressions?” The Silver Searcher is ranked 1st while sift 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 Cross-platform
Supports Linux, Windows, OSX, and several BSDs.