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:
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Searching for numbers by value rather than regular expression: find 255 expressed as 0b1111_1111, 0377, 255, or 0xff with "gg v 255 *.go". Note: this is a value ("v") search as opposed to a number ("n") search. Values must be valid Go integer or floating point literals (22, 0xface, 6.02214076e23, 0o644).
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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.
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Searching a file hierarchy recursively for comments containing "case" (ignoring switch statements), is "gg -r c case ."
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gg has a grep mode, "-g" which omits the Go grammar tokenization. This mode is generally twice as fast as standard gg, and even faster compared to classic grep. Related is "-go=false" to allow scanning of non-Go files.
gg does much more. Please see the man page for details.
go get github.com/MichaelTJones/gg
cd gg
go install