--type-add=module:match:/node_modules/ should work.

[idearat]

You can't create "type" filters that work on the full path, they only appear to work on the filename itself. Unfortunately this means you can't categorize files into types based on where they reside in your project. So you can't make a file type "test" for all files under a test dir, or "module" for all files under your node_modules directory. This would let you then search with a --type=nomodule or --type=notest but that currently doesn't work. Yes, you can --ignore-dir, but I think using pattern matching is more powerful and flexible.

[hoelzro]

@idearat This is an interesting idea, but how would this behave if you weren't at the project root? Let's say I'm in $ROOT/app/controllers and I do an ack --module something; how should that behave?

[idearat]

I don't expect ack to behave differently than it normally would in the sense I'd expect things to default to the current directory but offer the option of rooting the search elsewhere. It's simple enough to create aliases to push/pop a project root if that were consistently an issue within a project subtree.