grep came, then ack-grep, then silver-searcher and a few others, finally ripgrep. For most purposes, ripgrep (the one written in Rust) is the best of all of these tools, typically being the fastest and also the most Unicode-compliant, with the main downside being its non-deterministic ordering of output (because it searches files in parallel).
The only reason for using ack these days is if you’re already invested in a Perl workflow and can use some of the Perl magic powers, and don’t care about comparatively poor performance. That’s not many people.
The only reason for using ack these days is if you’re already invested in a Perl workflow and can use some of the Perl magic powers, and don’t care about comparatively poor performance. That’s not many people.