ack is a search tool designed for code. It's built to be a replacement for grep with higher speed and more options.

Installation

To install the latest version, use homebrew.

$ brew install ack

Why use ack over grep

• Faster
• Skips unimportant files by default
• It searches recursively by default
• Customizable

Usage

$ ack [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILES OR DIRECTORIES]

Let's say you want to find all JavaScript files that are using the module pancakes in your project, with ack it's as easy as

$ ack --js pancakes

Or you may want to find all files that does not contain the word brew

$ ack -L brew

Customization

You can customize ack to behave the way you want it to, this configuration i s stored in /.ackrc.

For example, you can add a custom type to use as a flag when searching. The following configuration will allow you to only search in .md, .mkd and .markdown files using the --markdown flag.

--type-set=markdown=.md,.mkd,.markdown

You can also tell ack to always sort and use colors in the result.

--sort-files--color

To see what configuration ack uses you can use the dump flag.

$ ack --dump

Alternatives to ack

There's  which describes itself as a

A code searching tool similar to ack, with a focus on speed.