The Silver Searcher is a high-performance text search utility and regex code search tool designed to locate strings and regular expressions within plain text and source code. It functions as a codebase pattern matcher that provides highlighted results with surrounding line context and respects standard ignore files.
The utility includes specialized capabilities for searching inside zlib and lzma compressed archives. It implements high-throughput processing via parallel-threaded file scanning and just-in-time regular expression compilation.
The tool's search and indexing surface covers output formatting with line numbers, search result analysis, and scope limitation through directory depth and symlink management. It also provides search filtering to exclude files and directories based on custom patterns or standard ignore lists.
