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.

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.