# The Silver Searcher

6 Hacker News commenters recommended The Silver Searcher and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Developers recommend it as a fast command-line code search tool that works the way they expect, with good performance on modern systems.

## Why people recommend it

- Intuitive, works as expected (2 comments): "Being able to use them intuitively trumps ubiquity, speed or features." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46363423)) "fd, rg and ag all work how I expect them to work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383284))
- Fast on modern systems (3 comments): "you will get better performance out of a modern grep like ag or rg" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291113)) "so far nothing beats rg/ag after the data has been moved into RAM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47610586)) "They are very fast on a modern system with SSD." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46651819))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ripgrep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ripgrep.md): 122 recommend
- [ast-grep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ast-grep.md): 21 recommend
- [Semble](https://hackerapproved.com/p/semble.md): 20 recommend
- [Graft (Claude Code hooks)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/graft.md): 13 recommend
- [Lat.md](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lat-md.md): 11 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "The Silver Searcher", https://hackerapproved.com/p/silver-searcher/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).