Ever found yourself juggling between your terminal and a grep command guide when you’re deep inside a project? Meet Clapgrep, a sleek, modern utility that brings the speed of terminal search tools into a user-friendly graphical interface. It’s how I turn complex queries into a simple “point and click” operation.
Installing Clapgrep
Clapgrep is available on FlatHub. So, if you have Flatpak installed, install Clapgrep by running
flatpak install flathub de.leopoldluley.ClapgrepOnce installed, run it with this command:
flatpak run de.leopoldluley.Clapgrep
It’s also available on AUR in case you’re an Arch Linux user.
It’s blazing fast
For a GUI app, I thought there would be some speed drawbacks. But I misjudged it. It’s that fast. Comparing Clapgrep’s speed to grep’s, I didn’t see much or any difference. Part of such speed’s credit can be given to the Rust language, which is what Clapgrep is made of.
It started firing results the moment I clicked the “Start Search” button. It scanned 1,800+ files for my search phrase and returned all results.
For system-wide search, the speed was much better than I expected.
It’s great for large results
One issue I often run into with grep is that if the result is too long, the terminal keeps automatically scrolling. You have to stop scrolling to look for the result you’re looking for. In Clapgrep, everything is ready to use right after you run the search.
That’s not all. All the results are nicely formatted. The file names appear in bold with the full path. Moreover, you also see the line numbers where those results are in the file. To put the cherry on top, if you click on the line, it will open the file in Clapgrep and jump to that line for quick previewing. Clicking on the file name will open it in a text editor.
After using grep, this is a big quality-of-life feature. Instead of looking at messy, jumbled results in the terminal, I have everything organized on a fine GUI screen and ready to be used for the next step.
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Regex and other cool search options
It doesn’t just stop at simple search and keyword matching, though. Clapgrep supports all the necessary tools you need to make power searches. Your search uses regex by default. You can disable them if you don’t need them.
You can select a search path from the options for narrowing down the path where your file may exist. You can choose the file path using the GUI file picker, which is convenient.
Moreover, you have the options to make your search case-sensitive, and include hidden and ignored files. The File Pattern option lets you also narrow down files according to extensions. For example, let’s say you only want to search for log files. You can put a *.log pattern in the File Pattern field for that. Besides, you can choose what type of files to search for, such as PDF files or office files.
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No need to remember grep commands
This is the best part of using Clapgrep. With a user-friendly GUI, I don’t need to memorize any of grep’s flags or syntax. If there’s a specific need or niche use for grep, I won’t have to look up the manpage, look at each flag to know which one I need, and then organize everything together to make a command. I can just put the search term in Clapgrep, specify the settings, and call it a day.
Instead of wrestling with a terminal string like grep -rnEi --include="*.log" "error" ., I’m presented with a clean interface where logic is separated into intuitive fields. In the terminal, if you realize you forgot to exclude a directory, you have to Ctrl+C, recall the previous command with the up-arrow, and append the correct flag. In Clapgrep, you simply toggle a switch or update the File Pattern field.
I’ll still use grep, though
Having Clapgrep doesn’t mean I won’t use grep anymore. A CLI tool has its own advantages. For starters, Clapgrep is still missing some advanced search features that grep or some of its alternatives offer.
Secondly, Bash scripts! I use them a lot. A lot of them have to do with grep. I can’t use a GUI tool for scripting, of course. That’s where grep is the only choice.
Finally, command piping. So many times, I don’t just end with a grep command. I need to further process the output I get from it. Like, saving the output, formatting it using other Linux commands, or analyzing the results. I can’t do that with a GUI tool. So, I’ll have to use grep anyway.
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Despite being a great tool, Clapgrep isn’t a full replacement for grep. However, I can definitely see myself using it for quick and simple searches. Check out the tool’s GitHub repository.
