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.




PowerGREP is described as 'Powerful Windows grep tool. Quickly search through large numbers of files on your PC or network, including text and binary files, compressed archives, MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, OpenOffice files, etc' and is a File Search utility in the file management category. There are more than 50 alternatives to PowerGREP for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and iPad apps. The best PowerGREP alternative is FSearch, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like PowerGREP are DocFetcher, Agent Ransack, grepWin and Clapgrep.
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.




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


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.


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.



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...




AnyTXT Searcher is a powerful local data full-text search engine, just like a local disk Google search engine. It is your ideal desktop search tool.




SearchMyFiles is a non-indexing portable alternative to the standard "Search For Files And Folders" module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content...


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.



Indexes and quickly searches over 170 file types and emails, including attachments and multimedia files, on desktops, external and network drives, as well as cloud environments, offering sub-second results and a 75,000 file index size limit in the free version.



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.

regex is a must for a grep tool. PowerGREP is a powerful tool while DocFetcher is a very simple tools and not comparable.