ack: beautiful grep replacement

A friend of mine pointed out ack to me today. ack is a perl replacement for grep. I must say I am impressed and at the same time baffled that I had not been bothered much by this before.

It's one of those cases where once you see the light, you never want to go back. Check out this search with both grep and ack:





ack ignores .svn (and other VCS files) automatically, and is much better that showing you the information you are looking for, which is why you were looking for it in the first place. The file name is above the match, make the match itself clearer, and the match is color highlighted.

Beautiful. Oh, and it's cross-platform too.