Grox is a command-line tool that searches a file tree for regex matches.

Usage

For example,

$ grox the
(0) ./lib.rs:19: ... / * `file` - Path to the file.
(1) ./lib.rs:20: ... e number (1-up) of the match.
(2) ./lib.rs:50: ... rror message if either `max_depth` was  ...
(3) ./lib.rs:51: ... n't have access to the starting direct ...
(4) ./lib.rs:151: .and_then(|name| name.to ...
(5) ./lib.rs:152: .and_then(|name| name.ch ...
(6) ./lib.rs:314: ... oing to fold my clothes"
(7) ./main.rs:18: ... tory. Defaults to the current working  ...
(8) ./main.rs:28: ... hort, help = "Open the file for the spec ...

By default the search starts with the current working directory. You can change this by -d DIRECTORY.

You can limit the directory search depth by -p DEPTH. A depth of 1 searches only the starting directory.

If you only want to get the names of the matching files, add -n:

$ grox the -n
(0) ./lib:rs
(1) ./main.rs

If you only want to search files whose names match a certain pattern, you can use -f:

$ grox the -f '\.rs$'

Opening files

You can open the n-th match in an editor with the -l option. For example, say you found these matches:

$ grox some_pattern
(0) file1.txt:55: ...
(1) file2:txt:2: ...

If you wanted to open up file1.txt, you could run the search again with -l:

$ grox some_pattern -l 0

If the EDITOR environment variable is set, then Grox will use the specified executable. Otherwise, it will try to use vim followed by vi. You can manually specify the editor by

$ grox some_pattern -l 0 -e less

If the chosen editor is either vim, vi, or code, then Grox will open up the file to the line containing the match.

History

When you run a search without -l and stdout is a terminal, a history file is created at ~/.grox_history.json. If you then re-run the exact same search with -l, Grox will grab the result from the history file instead of re-running the search.

Every search that doesn't use -l will overwrite the history file if it exists. That is, only the most recent search is saved.