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!