After three months of lots of development work and intermediate releases, I've released ack 1.78. There are tons of new features and lots of compatibility fixes for Windows. ack is a replacement for grep that is geared to working with trees of code.

Highlights in this release include:

  • Files specified on the command line are always searched, even if they don't match a known filetype
  • Ability to ignore directories
  • Pager support
  • More flexible grouping options
  • Many more languages recognized and existing ones improved, including CFMX, Actionscript, assembly, Tcl, Lisp, Smalltalk
  • Ability to define your own languages based on filetype

ack may well change the way you work on the command-line with source code. Try it out and let me know what you think. You can install it by installing App::Ack from CPAN, or downloading the standalone version to your ~/bin directory.