Some time ago I came across sift, a “fast and powerful open source alternative to grep”. ack has long been my weapon of choice, but it depends on Perl while sift is distributed as a single executable.

After using it as my daily driver for a couple of months I’ve noticed that it’s a worthy competitor to git-grep, although the latter is still a bit faster.

Configuration

sift has a feature, --write-config, which enables you to save your configuration directly on the command line:

sift --smart-case --filename --line-number --group --column --git --exclude-files=tags,.gitattributes --write-config

The --git flag makes it possible to ignore patterns from a project’s .gitignore file, which is super nice.

Fuzzy file finding

You can use the flag --targets to use sift as a fuzzy file finder:

sift --targets --ext js

You can also supply a pattern in order to narrow down the search:

sift --targets --ext js test

Integrating with Vim

To use sift in Vim, configure the grepprg and grepformat options:

set grepprg=sift\ --no-group\ --no-color
set grepformat=%f:%l:%c:%m,%f:%l:%m

Depending on how you’ve configured it you may need to add additional flags. In order for the above grepformat to work you have to have --filename, --line-number and --column enabled.

To use it as an indexer for CtrlP, add this:

let g:ctrlp_user_command = 'sift --no-conf --ignore-case --no-color --no-group --git --targets --path "" %s'

And you’re good to go!