It restricts the search to designated Go token classes, such as identifiers, package names, numbers, comments, keywords, and the rest. Because gg understands what it is searching for, it can make smart matches. For example:

• Searching for numbers by value, 255 for example, no matter if expressed as 0b1111_1111, 0377, 255, or 0xff is easy with "gg v 255 *.go". Note: this is a value ("v") search as opposed to the number ("n") search. Numbers support literals like 255 and regular expression patterns like "2[0-9]." but values must be valid Go integer or floating point literals (22, 0xface, 6.02214076e23).

• Searching for "if" in Go keywords, but not in comments or strings, is "gg k if ." for keywords matching "if" in all the ".go" files in the current directory.

• Searching a file hierarchy recursively for comments containing "case" (ignoring switch statements), is "gg -r c case ."

gg does much more. Please see the man page for details.

go get github.com/MichaelTJones/gg
cd gg
go install