Are we supposed to know what "ag" is?
The progression is grep with a ton of flags (or even find | xargs grep) -> ack -> ag.
ag is faster than ack, automatically understands .gitignore, gives you .agignore as well, and is just a really nice piece of software.
Does seem like there is hope, as a BSD licensed version exists. My fingers are crossed that this is solved soon :)
I often need to search only on a subset of the files checked in git. Example, I don't search the min.js files but I need them for the deploys.
It would be nice if they could share the same format.