I had never heard of The Silver Searcher. Thanks! A test search of a huge codebase (Firefox) took 38 seconds with ack, but only 17 with ag! After my page cache had been warmed up, ack then took 10 seconds and ag only took 3. That said, I am using ack 1.96, not ack 2.0.
It's OK to have two similar tools in your toolbox. When you need the --output option, for example, you use ack. When you want crazy speed, you use ag.
You don't have to choose one over the other. That's why I changed the name from "betterthangrep.com" to "beyondgrep.com". There's no need to have a ranking of "I use this over that."
Turning things around, I often have SQL dumps around, so ack --no-sql is a real lifesaver in my Rails (i.e ruby, coffee, less, shell and whatnot) projects.
