I'm never sure whether or not I should adopt these fancy new command line tools that come out. I get them on my muscle memory and then all of a sudden I ssh into a machine that doesn't have any of these and I'm screwed...
I have to switch back and forth between ack and grep all the time. Sometimes I use ack, sometimes I use grep. I wrote ack, but I've never stopped using grep, and ack has never been intended as a replacement for grep.
For most of the common ack flags, they are the same as grep. -i, -l, -v, -w, -A, -B, -C, etc. That was intentional, to minimize that whiplash.
One other suggestion is that you drop ack into your ~/bin directory that you sync between machines. It's a single Perl file, and that portability is a feature. As long as your machine has a Perl on it, you can use ack.
