The Silver Searcher, or ag: <a href="https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher</a><p>Designed as a replacement for all of the use cases of Ack. Is even faster.
While "would you rather type" examples are OK, I wish more people would learn how to use their shell's short-cuts and trivial scripting.<p>Whenever you find yourself repeatedly running long and awkward commands that you wish were shorter, you ought to think about converting them into an alias or a script.