I started using ack about 14 years ago, so theres a lot of inertia there. It is slower than the others, but it was so much faster at the time for searching through source trees than grep.

For log colorizing, I make use of the --color-match and --passthru arguments, like https://powdahound.com/2009/10/colorize-log-output-with-ack/

For log colorizing, here's the approximate equivalent of that blog post for ripgrep:

    cat UNLICENSE 
      | rg --passthru --color always --colors 'match:fg:red' public 
      | rg --passthru --color always --colors 'match:fg:green' heirs 
      | rg --passthru --color always --colors 'match:fg:cyan' benefit