This is the #1 showstopper issue for me. Until it’s possible to do the equivalent of EXWM switching is not really an option for me. Somebody has presented preliminary work on this at EmacsConf last year but it still has ways to go.
Unfortunate that we have taken such a big backwards step in this area.

A few more options that I use pretty much daily:

• -v for reversing the match (display non-matching instead of matching)
• -e to specify multiple patterns, matching any one is sufficient
• -w to match only at word boundaries, easier to type than the equivalent regexp
• -c for displaying the match count rather than the matches

And some that that I use occasionally:

• -NUM, -B NUM, -A NUM also show NUM lines around/before/after match
• -l to display only the filenames with the matches
• -F “fixed” pattern meaning literal match only rather than regexp. Great to avoid having to quote regexp special characters when you don’t need regexp matching
• -P for PCRE style regexps
• -f to read match patterns from a file
• -q quiet, only produce exit status, no output. Useful in shell expressions (scripts, one liners).
• -a force treating the input as text (useful to override the binary detection heuristic. mnemonic: ascii)