grep Alternatives

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.