Small clarification: ack did not and does not respect your gitignore files. I just tried it myself, and indeed it doesn't. And this is consistent with the featu

Small clarification: ack did not and does not respect your gitignore files. I just tried it myself, and indeed it doesn't. And this is consistent with the feature chart maintained by the author of ack: https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/ https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/ One practical result of this is that it will mean `ack` will be quite slow when searching typical checkouts of Node.js or Rust projects, because it won't automatically ignore the `node_modules` or `target` directories. In both cases, those directories can become enormous. `ack` will ignore things like `.git` by default though. I believe `ag` was the first widely used grep-like tool that attempted to respect your .gitignore files automatically. (Besides, of course, `git grep`. But `git grep` behaves a little differently. It only searches what is tracked in the repo, and that may or may not be in sync with the rules in your gitignores.)