ack is a grep like for programmers. I'm used to run grep -R and find ... -exec grep to search for something in my code or in others code. But since I found ack, I definitely switched to ack when I code. ack website.

My favourites features:

  • Color highlighting of search results
  • Searches recursively through directories by default, while ignoring .svn, CVS and other VCS directories
  • Many command-line switches are the same as in GNU grep, so the transition is nothing

ack 1.78 is out