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Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

Posted on β€’ Originally published at waylonwalker.com

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ag silver searcher look ahead and look behind

A super useful tool when doing PR's or checking your own work during a big refactor is the silver searcher. Its a super fast command line based searching tool. You just run ag "<search term>" to search for your search term. This will list out every line of every file in any directory under your current working directory that contains a match.

Ahead/Behind

It's often useful to need some extra context around the change. I recently reviewed a bunch of PR's that moved schema from save_args to the root of the dataset in all yaml configs. To ensure they all made it to the top level DataSet configuraion, and not underneath save_args. I can do a search for all the schemas, and ensure that none of them are under save_args anymore.

ag "schema: " -A 12 -B 12
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Top comments (2)

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair β€’

These are flags copied from grep and they'll also work in other replacements like ack and ripgrep.

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Waylon Walker β€’

Oh nice, not sure why I didn't put this together in the moment. I always forget them and have to look them up in the --help. I just looked in my history and saw that I have used it with rg many times.