Ask HN: Instant realtime grep tool for Linux

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33306186

by leakbang • 4 years ago

2 8 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have been searching for an instant, real-time grep tool to search through source code on Linux but I haven't found any application that does this.

I have only found ONE ancient app only available on Windows, called Baregrep.

Is there any app like this but also available for Linux?

wildcow• 4 years ago

Ripgrep? Or are you looking for something with an UI also?

leakbang4• 4 years ago

From what I could tell by looking at ripgrep's github page, it works exactly the same as grep. So it is not real-time as I type, search.

burntsushi3• 4 years ago

It might be fast enough though. You haven't specified your corpus size. If your corpus is small enough, ripgrep might be instant enough. Another alternative is to look at fzf paired with ripgrep, but I imagine for large enough corpus sizes, it won't be instant.

Otherwise, if you're searching something large and really absolutely need "real time as I type" as a hard requirement, then you'll not really be looking for a grep per se, but for a tool that builds an inverted index and uses that for searches. So things like Russ Cox's 'codesearch', 'qgrep', 'livegrep' and Sourcegraph.

Ask HN: Instant realtime grep tool for Linux

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