grep Alternatives
grep is described as 'command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression' and is an app in the File Management category. There are more than 25 alternatives to grep for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and PortableApps.com. The best alternative is DocFetcher, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like grep are Agent Ransack (Freemium), grepWin (Free, Open Source), dnGREP (Free, Open Source) and AstroGrep (Free, Open Source).
- DocFetcher is a portable German/English open source desktop search application. It allows you search the contents of documents on your computer. - You can think of it as Google for your local document repository.
- Agent Ransack is a tool for finding files and information on your hard drive fast and efficiently. When searching the contents of files Agent Ransack also displays the text found. Users can then quickly browse the results without having to separately open each file!
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Windows
- 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.
- Free • Open Source
- Windows
- PortableApps.com
- 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.
- Free • Open Source
- Windows
No screenshots yet - 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.
- Free • Open Source
- Windows
- ripgrep is a command line search tool that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw speed of GNU grep. Why should I use ripgrep?
- Silver Searcher is a code search tool similar to ack that claims to be much faster. It's implemented in C and has some extra features such as ignoring files per .hignore, .gitignore contents.No screenshots yet
- regexxer is a nifty GUI search/replace tool featuring Perl-style regular expressions. If you need project-wide substitution and you’re tired of hacking sed command lines together, then you should definitely give it a try.
- Ack is designed as a standalone (one perl file) replacement for 99% of the uses of grep. ack is intelligent about the files it searches. It knows about certain file types, based on both the extension on the file and, in some cases, the contents of the file.
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Linux
ack vs grep opinions
DesertShadow SO much simpler. Sane, modern, defaults. - Quickly search through large numbers of files on your PC or network using powerful text patterns to find exactly the information you want. Search and replace with plain text or regular expressions to maintain web sites, source code, reports, ...
- Paid • Proprietary
- Windows