Feature requests

These are all features that we are not implementing now.

This is not to say that we might not add them in the future, just that they're not being done now.

Provide an option in ack to only parse files passed to it.

ack -x takes a list of files that ack will search, kind of like xargs. It also doesn't pay any attention to --type. A request has come in to have -x respect --type. (GH #614)

Color code output based on the type of the file

If ack knows --perl from --php from --sql, maybe ack could color code the search results in some way? So I can say "Oh, there's an orange file, it's PHP, I wasn't expecting that". (GH #605)

Trim or ignore long lines

If ack finds a match in e.g. minified js file, or other files with just one or few very long lines, it will flood the output with the contents of the file and likely push all useful matches off-screen.

I would like an option to either ignore such matches altogether (maybe list the file name), or possibly to only show some number of characters worth of context around the match. (GH #596)