The Platinum Searcher

The Platinum Searcher (pt) is a code search tool similar to The Silver Searcher (ag) and ack, written in Go by the monochromegame project. With over 3,700 stars as of 2026, pt was created to provide the speed of ag while being easier to install (single Go binary instead of C compilation) and cross-platform. Key features include: fast multi-threaded search using Go goroutines for parallel file scanning, automatic .gitignore, .hgignore, and .ptignore compliance (respecting version control ignore files), support for multiple version control systems (Git, Mercurial, Subversion), regular expression search using Go regexp package, file type filtering (supporting custom file type definitions in .ptconfig.toml), colorized output with ANSI escape codes, context lines before and after matches (-A, -B, -C flags), case-insensitive search (-i), word-boundary matching (-w), inverted match (-v), count mode (-c), file name only mode (-l), interactive edit mode (opening matching files in editor with -e flag), grep-compatible options (designed to be a drop-in replacement for grep in many cases), and cross-platform binaries (pre-compiled for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD without compilation requirements). The Platinum Searcher fills the niche between ag (requires C compilation) and ripgrep (requires Rust) for Go-centric development environments.