ack has been an indispensable tool in my workflow for a few years now. I use it several times a day to search code bases... most of the time, not even taking advantage of regexes or all of its many abilities. Just a basic keyword search is usually enough; the output looks great.
The feature I've wanted the most is the local project-specific .ackrc ability. I have some projects where I need to be able to ignore specific files/dirs; I think this feature will address that need.
The silver searcher (Ag)[1] ignores files from .gitignore/.hgignore by default, so I find that this sort of project-specific configuration isn't generally needed. There are various editor plugins for Ag, e.g. Ag.vim[2] based on mileszs' excellent Ack.vim[3].
Editor integrations fail badly with big codebases though. I don't use sublime text, but I can't imagine getting it to index, say, the entire kernel (or the /frameworks subtree of an Android build, etc...) faster than a recursive grep will return.
That said, I don't use ack. I've tried it a few times and it looks great and works well, but honestly this particular task turns out not to be one where I demand polish and features. Really, all I want is grep.
me too, i've tried ack several times but i'm not stuck to it because i've always been able to find anything i was searching for with, tataaa : simple grep and locate.
I use Sublime as my editor as well. Sublime's search functionality is pretty good too, and I can't there's anything bad about it, for my typical use cases... but I've become very used to reaching for ack, and I love the highlighting it uses. On the other hand Sublime does support double click to open on file names in search results.
The feature I've wanted the most is the local project-specific .ackrc ability. I have some projects where I need to be able to ignore specific files/dirs; I think this feature will address that need.