I use this all the time at work. I get people asking me all the time, “How do you get your grep results to look like that?”
From the ack website (via http://kkovacs.eu/):
- Blazing fast: It’s fast because it only searches the stuff it makes sense
to search.- Better search: Searches entire trees by default while ignoring Subversion,
Git and other VCS directories and other files that aren’t your source code.- Designed for code search: Where grep is a general text search tool, ack
is especially for the programmer searching source code. Common tasks take
fewer keystrokes.- Highly portable: ack is pure Perl, so it easily runs on a Windows
installation Perl (like Strawberry Perl) without modifications.- Free and open: Ack costs nothing. It’s 100% free and open source under
Artistic License v2.0.