pss was inspired by ack (http:https://betterthangrep.com/) - a similar tool written in Perl. Prior to writing pss, I've been using and enjoying ack for many years - thanks to ack's author Andy Lester for that!

pss clones ack's functionality (implementing most of the features). The reason I decided to write and release it is mainly that Python is my language of choice, and installing Perl to run ack became a chore (chiefly on Windows machines, since on Linux Perl is usually installed by default). Really, the only reason I've been installing Perl on Windows boxes I had to work on in the past couple of years was to enable them to run ack.

Moreover, pss comes with a terminal-color library built-in, so unlike ack it doesn't require to install any additional modules to nicely color its output on Windows (ack requires Win32::Console::ANSI).

I have some ideas for extending pss with extra features, and wanted to be able to do that in Python, without having to dust off my Perl skills. Other Pythonistas may find pss attractive for the same reason. pss is implemented in a very modular manner - the main script is just a thin wrapper over a library which can be used programmatically for a variety of purposes. In other words, pss is quite hackable.

Finally, pss just seemed like a cool project to do. Its existence is not meant to detriment ack in any way.