Free alternative(s) to PowerGREP

windows regex grep utility
Mischa Kroon picture Mischa Kroon · Jul 6, 2009 · Viewed 31.5k times · Source

First of all, great praise goes out to PowerGREP it's a great program.

But it's not free. Some of it's options I'm looking for: Being able to use .NET regexp's (or similar) to find things in a filtered list of files through subdirectories.

Replacing that stuff with other regexps.

Being able to jump to that part of the file in some sort of editor.

Non commandline.

Being able to copy the results / filename and occurrences of the text.

Low overhead would also be nice so not too many dependencies etc.

And I need it on windows.

Answer

Diaa Sami picture Diaa Sami · Nov 25, 2012

I would suggest trying the new dnGrep, it's a .NET application that provides grep-like functionality and has almost all the features you specified.

Here are the features and a sample screenshot:

  • Shell integration (ability to search from explorer)
  • Plain text/regex/XPath search (including case-insensitive search)
  • Phonetic search (using Bitap and Needleman-Wunch algorithms)
  • File move/copy/delete actions
  • Search inside archives (via plug-in)
  • Search MS Word documents (via plug-in)
  • Search PDF documents (via plug-in)
  • Undo functionality
  • Optional integration with text editor (like notepad++)
  • Bookmarks (ability to save regex searches for the future)
  • Pattern test form
  • Search result highlighting
  • Search result preview
  • Does not require installation (can be run from USB drive)

dnGrep screenshot

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