tag - Tag your ag matches

tag is a lightweight wrapper around ag that generates shell aliases for ag matches. tag is a very fast Golang rewrite of sack.

tag only supports ag. There are no plans to support ack or grep. Support for pt may be added if users show interest.

Why should I use tag?

tag makes it easy to immediately jump to an ag match in your favorite editor. It eliminates the tedious task of typing vim foo/bar/baz.qux +42 to jump to a match by automatically generating these commands for you as shell aliases.

Inside vim, vim-grepper or ag.vim is probably the way to go. Outside vim (or inside a Neovim :terminal), tag is your best friend.

Finally, tag is unobtrusive. It should behave exactly like ag under most circumstances.

Performance Benchmarks

tag processes ag's output on-the-fly with Golang using pipes so the performance loss is neglible. In other words, tag is just as fast as ag!

$ cd ~/github/torvalds/linux
$ time ( for _ in {1..10}; do  ag EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL >/dev/null 2>&1; done )
16.66s user 16.54s system 347% cpu 9.562 total
$ time ( for _ in {1..10}; do tag EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL >/dev/null 2>&1; done )
16.84s user 16.90s system 356% cpu 9.454 total

Installation

1. Make sure ag is installed, version >= 0.25.0.

2. Install the tag binary using one of the following methods.

   • Homebrew (OSX)

     $ brew tap aykamko/tag-ag
     $ brew install tag-ag
     

   • AUR (Arch Linux)

     Using your favorite AUR helper, install the tag-ag AUR package like this:

     $ aura -A tag-ag
     

   • Download a compressed binary for your platform

   • Developers and other platforms

     $ go get -u github.com/aykamko/tag/...
     $ go install github.com/aykamko/tag
     

3. Since tag generates a file with command aliases for your shell, you'll have to drop the following in your bashrc/zshrc to actually pick up those aliases.

   • bash

     if hash ag 2>/dev/null; then
       tag() { command tag "$@"; source ${TAG_ALIAS_FILE:-/tmp/tag_aliases} 2>/dev/null; }
       alias ag=tag
     fi

   • zsh

     if (( $+commands[tag] )); then
       tag() { command tag "$@"; source ${TAG_ALIAS_FILE:-/tmp/tag_aliases} 2>/dev/null }
       alias ag=tag
     fi

   • fish - ~/.config/fish/functions/tag.fish

     function tag
         set -q TAG_ALIAS_FILE; or set -l TAG_ALIAS_FILE /tmp/tag_aliases
         command tag $argv; and source $TAG_ALIAS_FILE ^/dev/null
         alias ag tag
     end

Configuration

tag exposes the following configuration options via environment variables:

• TAG_ALIAS_FILE
  • Path where shortcut alias file will be generated.
  • Default: /tmp/tag_aliases
• TAG_ALIAS_PREFIX
  • Prefix for alias commands, e.g. the e in generated alias e42.
  • Default: e
• TAG_CMD_FMT_STRING
  • Format string for alias commands. Must contain {{.Filename}} and {{.LineNumber}} for proper substitution.
  • Default: vim {{.Filename}} +{{.LineNumber}}

License

MIT

Author

aykamko