// the take
pss is a pure-Python ack-style code search tool: walks a directory tree, skips VCS metadata and junk by default, and greps file contents with colored output. It's for people who want ack/ag-style searching with zero compiled dependencies, not for anyone chasing ripgrep-level speed.
Clean separation of concerns in psslib (filefinder, contentmatcher, outputformatter are distinct modules, not one monolith). Sensible defaults out of the box - it already knows to skip .git/.svn/.bzr/CVS and filters by file type without a config file. Can run straight from an unzipped source tree with no install step, which matters on locked-down machines. Test suite uses real fixture directories with nasty edge cases (CRLF vs LF, Emacs backup files, non-ASCII filenames) instead of just mocking the filesystem.
It's a regex-over-Python-strings scanner with no mention of parallelism or mmap - on a large repo it will be noticeably slower than ripgrep or ag, and that's the whole category it's competing in. Vendors its own copy of colorama inside psslib/colorama instead of depending on the PyPI package, so colorama bugfixes never arrive automatically and the vendored copy can drift. No .gitignore awareness visible - it relies on its own hardcoded ignore list rather than respecting a project's actual ignore rules, so it'll search generated/vendored directories a .gitignore would exclude. Public-domain licensing is unusual enough that some companies' legal teams will flag it before approving adoption.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →