Indeed... the MacOS command line tools often are missing or have some different defaults and hotkeys (I'm looking at you, 'top') than the versions I'm used to on my linux systems, which, sure, ecosystem diversity is cool and all, but... Every time I try to rearrange the processor usage in TOP, I open it up and think 'IT'S A TRAP!'

(admittedly, this was all just an attempt at making a sufficiently substantive comment so I could make the joke about 'ack --bar')

I think top in macOS is the BSD version where top in most linux distributions is the GNU version. Same with tar.

Does any platform ship with ack? I wouldn’t expect any mainstream one to. (And for any platform inclined to add useful utilities, I’d suggest ripgrep rather than ack, as it’s way faster, and superior in almost every regard.)

You can probably install it via Homebrew.

Yep!

  brew install ack