Nested searches are handy. They can also be used to find cases of one thing within a few lines of proximity to another: ack -C5 firstThing | less /sec

Nested searches are handy. They can also be used to find cases of one thing within a few lines of proximity to another: ack -C5 firstThing | less /secondThing One bonus ack trick that I like also like is bulk loading into Emacs for further manipulation (e.g., multi-occur and then occur-edit-mode): emacsclient -n `ack -l functionName`