You can do a lot of things with `grep -E`, fwiw - there's not much here to really sell ack. Things that do sell ack, for me: ack css_class --sass # se

You can do a lot of things with `grep -E`, fwiw - there's not much here to really sell ack. Things that do sell ack, for me: ack css_class --sass # search .sass and .scss ack some_method --no-flash # ignore .as and .mxml # ignore compiled css in every Rails project on # my system (as long as I `ack` from the root) --ignore-dir=public/stylesheets/compiled And the fact that it prints out like this: path/to/file.ext 123: some text matching 234: more text matching path/to/other/file.ext 480: a match instead of like this (with `-n`): path/to/file.ext:123: a match path/to/other/file.ext:567: another match path/to/that/file/you/didnt/know/you_had.ext:32: yet another match makes it massively more useful for human-viewing of the results than the normal behavior of grep. And it reverts to grep-like output when you pipe it into something, so you can go from exploration to composition with no effort.