Windows Grep Alternatives

Windows Grep is described as 'The program combines the power and flexibility of traditional command line grep utilities available on DOS, UNIX and other platforms with the ease of use of Microsoft Windows' and is an app in the os & utilities category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Windows Grep for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Chocolatey and Web-based apps. The best Windows Grep alternative is grepWin, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Windows Grep are AstroGrep, SearchMyFiles, dnGREP and TextSeek.

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Alternatives list

  1. grepWin icon
     75 likes

    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.

    35 grepWin alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    • PortableApps.com
    • Chocolatey
     
  2. AstroGrep icon
     33 likes

    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.

    39 AstroGrep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  3. SearchMyFiles icon
     35 likes

    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...

    111 SearchMyFiles alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  4. dnGREP icon
     41 likes

    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...

    57 dnGREP alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  5. TextSeek icon
     9 likes

    TextSeek is a professional full-text desktop search tool for Windows and MacOS. It supports PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, RTF and other formats.

    Cost / License

    • Freemium
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
     
  6. Find and Replace (FNR) is an open source tool to find and replace text in multiple files.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  7. grep icon
     35 likes

    grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.

    43 grep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • Haiku
     
  8.  2 likes

    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...

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Homebrew
    • MacPorts
    • Termux
    • BSD
    • FreeBSD
    • OpenBSD
    • NetBSD
    • Alpine Linux
    • Chocolatey
    • Windows
     
  9. 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.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
     
  10. 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.

    21 The Silver Searcher alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Linux
    • BSD
     
  11. PowerGREP icon
     22 likes

    PowerGREP is a 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.

    82 PowerGREP alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Paid
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  12. Search files with smart queries as with Google, replace simple or multiline text in multiple files. The batch replace operation easily updates hundreds of different links in several files. Extremely fast, easy to use, with excellent help.

    Cost / License

    • Paid
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
12 of 40 Windows Grep alternatives