I do in file search a lot, and used to love grep. Then I learn the existence of egrep, so I switched to benefit from the advanced regexp. Then I discovered the Eclipse search tool. Much easier to use that grep. Then I found ack : fast, easy, powerful. And now I use grin, which is smooth for pythonistas. I know there is also a couple of this kind of tools with a GUI.
So what tool do you use, and why do you think it's the best. Practical features generally are :
- fast to fire and use;
- speedy processing;
- automatically ignore useless files;
- colored output;
- output lines, filename, context;
- allow complex regexp;
- allow a custom filtering and ouput;
- GUI + command line intergation;
- let you open an editor from the result set.
There are some related posts on SO :
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-tool-for-windows
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/981601/colorized-grep-viewing-the-entire-file-with-highlighting
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1028107/is-there-some-unix-util-that-will-allow-me-to-grep-multiple-files-with-little-type
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1027906/unix-find-grep-syntax-vs-awk
