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Add to SafariWhen comparing Mutt vs The Silver Searcher (Ag), the Slant community recommends The Silver Searcher (Ag) for most people. In the question“What are the best shell powertools?” The Silver Searcher (Ag) is ranked 4th while Mutt is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose The Silver Searcher (Ag) is:
It is written in C. It is up to 10 times faster than ack.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Terminal based
Pro Small and efficient
Pro Active development
Even though it was first released in 1995, Mutt still enjoys an active community following it and having new releases constantly.
Pro It runs inside the terminal
It doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements.
Pro Compose mails in your favorite editor
Edit mails efficiently with an editor you already can work fluently with.
Pro Highly configurable macros
Pro Threads emails
Pro Work with regular expressions
Mails can be filtered, deleted, flagged, etc. with regular expressions which makes mail management very efficient.
Pro Really fast
It is written in C. It is up to 10 times faster than ack.
Pro Simple syntax
Ack-compatible.
Pro Ignores files in .gitignore by default
It ignores file patterns from your .gitignore, .hgignore and .ignore. This can be a bit buggy though.
Pro Supports PCRE RegExp
Supports RegEx like look-ahead/behind (only fixed length lookbehind however).
Pro No need to manage another config file or learn a new config syntax
Everything is managed with command line args, meaning you can store commonly used options through .bashrc aliases, bash scripts, and/or autocompletion. There is no config file format to learn or extra dotfiles to manage.
Cons
Con Terminal-based
It runs inside the terminal so it doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements.
Con You have to remember commonly used options and add them as flags everytime
You are not able to define options in a config file as there is none. (You have to use a shell alias or wrapper script to get your default options.)
Con Cannot add custom file types
All file types ag is able to search for are baked into the executable. There is no way to add new ones neither via command line nor via (the not existing) config file. The only way is a pull request on github and waiting for a new release.
