ack AlternativesFile Search Utilities and other similar apps like ack

ack is described as 'Ack is designed as a standalone (one perl file) replacement for 99% of the uses of grep. ack is intelligent about the files it searches. It knows about certain file types, based on both the extension on the file and, in some cases, the contents of the file' and is a File Search utility in the file management category. There are more than 10 alternatives to ack for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and Self-Hosted apps. The best ack alternative is Agent Ransack, which is free. Other great apps like ack are grep, ripgrep, dnGREP and ugrep.

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Alternatives
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Alternatives list

  1. Agent Ransack icon
     113 likes

    Agent Ransack is a tool for finding files and information on your hard drive fast and efficiently. When searching the contents of files Agent Ransack also displays the text found. Users can then quickly browse the results without having to separately open each file!

    91 Agent Ransack alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Freemium
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  2. grep icon
     38 likes

    grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.

    47 grep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • Haiku
    • Linux Mobile
    Good alternative?
     
  3.  21 likes

    ripgrep is a command line search tool that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw speed of GNU grep.

    19 ripgrep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • BSD
    Good alternative?
     
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  4. dnGREP icon
     42 likes

    dnGrep allows you to search across files with easy-to-read results. Search through text files, Word documents, PDFs, and archives using text, regular expression, XPath, and phonetic queries. dnGrep includes search-and-replace, whole-file preview, right-click search in File...

    58 dnGREP alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  5.  4 likes

    A user-friendly, faster, more capable grep replacement. Includes a TUI, Google-like Boolean search with AND/OR/NOT, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches (nested) archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and...

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Homebrew
    • MacPorts
    • Termux
    • BSD
    • FreeBSD
    • OpenBSD
    • NetBSD
    • Alpine Linux
    • Chocolatey
    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  6. Silver Searcher is a code search tool similar to ack that claims to be much faster. It's implemented in C and has some extra features such as ignoring files per .hignore, .gitignore contents.

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Linux
    • BSD
    Good alternative?
     
  7. SeaGOAT icon
     2 likes

    SeaGOAT is an "AI-based" code search engine that you can run on your local computer, or you can run it on your server as a REST API. It can be considered an alternative to grep.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Platforms

    • Windows
    • Mac
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  8.  4 likes

    The awk utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs with just a few lines of code. Gawk is Gnu's interpreter for the awk language.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  9.  1 like

    App::Rak provides a CLI called rak that allows you to look for a pattern in (a selection of files) from one or more directories recursively. It has been modeled after utilities such as grep, ack, ag and rg, with a little bit of find mixed in, and -n and -p parameters of many...

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Mac
    • Windows
    • BSD
    Good alternative?
     
  10. Search multiple strings occurrences simultaneously with the help of this piece of software that comes with support for regular expressions.

    Cost / License

    • Freemium
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  11.  1 like

    Tiny ack-style file search utility. All arguments constitute the search text. No need to wrap most searches in double quotes. Short & written in Bash - just find & grep: you can edit it easily to suit your liking.

    6 spot alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • US flagUnited States
    spot screenshot 1
    Good alternative?
     
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