What do you mean by a "invested in a Perl workflow"? Do you mean "comfortable with Perl regexes"?
Other reasons that you may want to use ack:
* You want to define your own filetypes
* You want to define your own output using Perl regexes
* You need the portability of an uncompiled tool in a single source file that you can drop into your ~/bin when you can't install or compile anything on the box.
* You don't want to have to deal with a Rust runtime.
Thanks for the clarifications. I was under the impression that Rust required a lot of tough infrastructure.
I'm glad to see that ripgrep lets you define your own types. That ripgrep does it with globbing vs. the ways that ack allows is just another of the differences between the tools that people have to decide about.
I had real trouble getting ack to work when I first started using it. On Linux I had some trouble, I can’t remember what, but on Windows it was downright hard to get it to work properly. When using a new computer once I switched to ag one time because I was unable to get ack working on Windows.
I believe that defining the output using Perl regexes was what I was referring to with “Perl magic powers”. I work at FastMail, the backend of which is mostly Perl, and have been unable to convince most people to use ripgrep because they like Perl and ack and occasionally use some of that fancy superpower. I, on the other hand, lack that experience (I’m most used to Python, Rust and JavaScript, and have never seriously worked in Perl) and thus don’t really get anything out of ack over ripgrep, without putting in a fair bit of effort to figure out what I need to do in a particular case. I’m more likely to feed the output through sed or vim if I want to rewrite it, actually!
I’m very glad that ack existed; it led the way with better tools, and I used it heavily for some years. Thanks for making it!
> they like Perl and ack and occasionally use some of that fancy superpower. I, on the other hand, lack that experience
One of the things I'm working on right now is a cookbook that will ship with ack 3, currently about thisclose from going to beta. I want to show examples of the magic powers and see how powerful it can be. Your comment reinforces in my mind that it's an important thing to have.
> I’m very glad that ack existed; it led the way with better tools, and I used it heavily for some years. Thanks for making it!
You're very welcome. I'm continually pleased to see what's come out after it. A search tool arms race is a good thing.
You're very welcome. I'm glad it's made things easier. git grep, ag, rg, whatever: Just use whatever makes you happiest.
It's interesting how git grep makes the ack feature of "ignore your VCS dirs" not so important any more. I wonder how the grep-alike tool world would look if git weren't so dominant, and/or git didn't include its own grep.
Other reasons that you may want to use ack:
* You want to define your own filetypes
* You want to define your own output using Perl regexes
* You need the portability of an uncompiled tool in a single source file that you can drop into your ~/bin when you can't install or compile anything on the box.
* You don't want to have to deal with a Rust runtime.