The best open source alternative to PowerGREP is FSearch. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to PowerGREP and many of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to PowerGREP are DocFetcher, grepWin, Clapgrep and Cardinal File Search.
FSearch is a fast file search utility for GNU/Linux operating systems, inspired by Everything Search Engine. It's written in C and based on GTK+3.
FSearch is the most popular Linux alternative to PowerGREP.
FSearch is the most popular Open Source & free alternative to PowerGREP.
DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. — You can think of it as Google for your local files. The application runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, and is made available under the Eclipse Public License.
DocFetcher does not support regular expressions (regex) for text search
DocFetcher is the most popular Windows & Mac alternative to PowerGREP.
grepWin is a simple search and replace tool which can use PCRE regular expressions to search for strings of text within files. grepWin adds an entry to the shell context menu to easily search selected folders.
Ever had a folder full of PDF files, where you knew, somewhere in there, is what you're looking for. But you did not know in which file. So you had to search each of them at a time…
Quick macOS file searching with substring, prefix, suffix, exact, and path-mixed patterns, case-sensitive or regex search modes, instant language switching, keyboard shortcuts, Quick Look previews, Finder integration, clipboard copy, and open-source code.
AstroGrep is A Microsoft Windows GUI File Searching (grep) utility. Features include regular expressions, versatile printing options, stores most recent used paths and has a "context" feature which is very nice for looking at source code.
dnGrep allows you to search across files with easy-to-read results. Search through text files, Word documents, PDFs, and archives using text, regular expression, XPath, and phonetic queries. dnGrep includes search-and-replace, whole-file preview, right-click search in File...
Locate32 is software which can be used to find files from your harddrives and other locations. It works like updatedb and locate commands in Unix based systems. In other words, it uses databases to store information about directory structures and uses these databases in searches.
A fast real-time search engine for displaying regular expression matches (both file name and content) across multiple directories.
grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.
A user-friendly, faster, more capable grep replacement. Includes a TUI, Google-like Boolean search with AND/OR/NOT, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches (nested) archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and...
FAR is a simple tool for search and replace operations over multiple files. You can apply ordinary "word by word" replacement, or choose to use fully featured regular expressions.
Germany
EU
Switzerland
China
United States
Russia
Finland
regex is a must for a grep tool. PowerGREP is a powerful tool while DocFetcher is a very simple tools and not comparable.