🥇The release of ack 3.0.0 has taken place

A stable release of the ack 3.0.0 utility has taken place. ack is a grep-like tool for programmers, written in Perl.

In the new version:

A new option —proximate=N is available for ordering search results in relation to one another.
The behavior of the -w option, which enables whole-word searches, has been changed and improved. Previously, ack 2.x allowed non-alphabetic characters at the beginning and end of the pattern with the -w option. ack 3.x no longer allows this.
A -S option has been added as a synonym for —smart-case. This option sets a search algorithm that depends on the case of letters in the pattern. If all letters in the pattern are lowercase, the search will be case-insensitive; but if there is at least one uppercase letter, the search will be case-sensitive.
The -I option has been added, which enables case-sensitive searching.
Startup time is now 30-40% shorter compared to version 2.22 due to the removal of unused plugin support.
ack now defaults to supporting SVG, Markdown, and POD formats.