MightyGrep - A text searching and file finding tool

[ksylvestre]

Hello All

I'm developing a cross-platform application and I'm looking for feedback from macOS users. With this application, you can search for text within files and for filenames themselves. It has been in development for a few months and now it's ready for public beta. There is a free demo for macOS in the provided link, the minimum system supported is OS X Mavericks 10.9. The demo is a universal binary so it is compatible with both arm and intel based systems

link to demo

 

[Basic75]

Can this do anything that grep, find, mdfind and friends can't do in a shell with a couple of pipes? Does the use of imgui increase the processor load?

 

[ksylvestre]

Incremental searching of pattern text, i.e. restarting the search as soon as new text is entered. You can provide an editor command with $filepath, $line, and $column replacement strings so you can jump to a match via left clicking a row. This program is also NFD aware when it comes to filename matching. There is a processor cost associated with imgui but the majority of time is spent waiting for the next frame.

 

[ksylvestre]

Released version 0.13.0, key features for macOS:

• signed and notarized software builds
• added context option: show lines above/below matches
• switched demo to dmg format

 

[gilby101]

I'm developing a cross-platform application and I'm looking for feedback from macOS users. With this application, you can search for text within files and for filenames themselves.

My view:

The big value of this is it being cross-platform. And there will be those (e.g. linux developers) who value that.

But I suspect it will not make much headway with Mac only users. Most are satisfied by Spotlight, but those that want some thing different are well provided for by Find Any File (which can do RegEx searches on name and content and is lightning fast), along with utilities which use the Spotlight index (HoudahSpot, Alfred, etc.). Also Mac search tools use Quick Look to display file content which includes displaying the content of speciality file types as well as plain text content.

 

[ksylvestre]

My view:

The big value of this is it being cross-platform. And there will be those (e.g. linux developers) who value that.

But I suspect it will not make much headway with Mac only users. Most are satisfied by Spotlight, but those that want some thing different are well provided for by Find Any File (which can do RegEx searches on name and content and is lightning fast), along with utilities which use the Spotlight index (HoudahSpot, Alfred, etc.). Also Mac search tools use Quick Look to display file content which includes displaying the content of speciality file types as well as plain text content.

They definitely have the full text search market covered, hopefully I can attract the more niche developer crowd for searching plaintext files