There are many alternatives to grep for Mac if you are looking for a replacement. The best Mac alternative is DocFetcher, which is both free and Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 25 alternatives to grep and 16 are available for Mac so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting Mac alternatives to grep are ripgrep, The Silver Searcher, ack and UniversalCodeGrep.
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.
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.
SO much simpler. Sane, modern, defaults.
UniversalCodeGrep (ucg) is an extremely fast grep-like tool specialized for searching large bodies of source code. It is intended to be largely command-line compatible with Ack, to some extent with ag, and where appropriate with grep.
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.
A high-performance, cross-platform CLI tool for file filtering, batch processing, and workflow automation. It replaces fragmented Shell scripts with consistent Glob/Regex logic and async file streams.
TexFinderX is a freeware tool to search and replace text inside entire folders.
TexFinderX is MacOS X, Snow Leopard, Windows XP, Vista and Seven compatible.
Main features Search and replace text - with regular expression or not - in entire folders with the ability to filter de.
Rummage is a cross platform tool for crawling directories and searching and replacing in text files. It is written in Python and uses wxPython for the GUI. Rummage allows for literal or regex searches and has configurations for limiting the files etc.
Germany
EU
United States
China
Shorter name, more functionality.