Silver Searcher - ag
Spacemacs comes configured to use Silver Searcher as the default search tool, but it is only used if it is available in the underlying operating system.
Silver Searcher make searching much faster as it skips file and directory patterns defined in .gitignore and .htignore files. Additional patterns to be skipped can be defined in an .ignore file.
For Clojure and Clojurescript developers there are many files that you always want to ignore when searching your projects
- Compiled, compressed or minified files
- Patterns from your version control ignore files (eg. .gitignore)
Spacemacs search tool configuration
The search tools that Spacemacs looks for is configured in ~/.spacemacs
Hint
The grep command is installed on all good operating systems so will be the search tool used if no others are found.