1VGREP(1)(vgrep) VGREP(1)(vgrep)
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6 vgrep -- a user-friendly pager for grep
7
10 vgrep [OPTION...] PATTERNS [FILE...]
11 vgrep [OPTION...] -s [COMMAND][context] [SELECTORS]
14
17 vgrep is a pager for grep, git-grep, ripgrep and similar grep implemen‐
18 tations, and allows for opening the indexed file locations in a user-
19 specified editor such as vim or emacs.
20 vgrep is inspired by the ancient cgvg scripts but extended to perform
23 further operations such as listing statistics of files and directory
24 trees or showing the context lines before and after the matches.
25 vgrep runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
28 Note: vgrep is used to perform textual searches. On a technical level,
31 vgrep serves as a front-end to grep or git-grep when invoking vgrep in‐
32 side a git tree and uses less for displaying the results. All non-vgrep
33 flags and arguments will be passed down to grep. Results of the last
34 search are cached, so running vgrep without a new query will load pre‐
35 vious results and operate on them.
36 By default, the output will be written to less to make browsing large
39 amounts of data more comfortable. vgrep --no-less will write to stdout.
40
43 vgrep can open the indexed file locations in an editor specified by the
44 EDITOR environment variable. Opening one of the file locations from the
45 previous example may look as follows:
46 # export EDITOR=gedit
49 # vgrep --show 4
50 The default editor of vgrep is vim with the default flag to open a file
54 at a specific line being + followed by the line number. If your editor
55 of choice hits the rare case of a different syntax, use the EDITORLINE‐
56 FLAG environment variable to adjust. For example, a kate user may set
57 the environment to EDITOR="kate" and EDITORLINEFLAG="-l".
58 Note that vgrep does not allow for searching and opening files at the
61 same time. For instance, vgrep --show=files text should be split in two
62 commands: vgrep text and vgrep --show=files.
63 IDE Support
66 Note that if you run vgrep inside a terminal of VSCode or Goland, the
67 format of listed files changes to "$PATH:$LINE" to allow for opening
68 the matches in the editor via a simple mouse click.
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72 Once vgreped, you can perform certain operations on the results such as
73 limiting the range of indexed matches, listing matching files and di‐
74 rectories and more.
75 Enter a vgrep command: ? vgrep command help: command[context lines]
78 [selectors]
79 selectors: '3' (single), '1,2,6' (multi), '1-8' (range), 'all'
80 commands: print, show, context, tree, delete, keep, refine,
81 files, grep, quit, ?
82 vgrep commands can be passed directly to the --show/-s flag, for in‐
85 stance as --show c5 1-10 to show the five context lines of the first
86 ten matched lines. Furthermore, the commands can be executed in an in‐
87 teractive shell via the --interactive/-i flag. Running vgrep --interac‐
88 tive will enter the shell directly, vgrep --show 1 --interactive will
89 first open the first matched line in the editor and enter the interac‐
90 tive shell after.
91
94 • print,p - Limit the range of matched lines to be printed. p
95 1-12,20 prints the first 12 lines and the 20th line.
96 • show,s - Open the selectors in an user-specified editor (re‐
98 quires selectors).
99 • context,c - Print the context lines before and after the
101 matched lines. c10 3-9 prints 10 context lines of the matching
102 lines 3 to 9. Unless specified, vgrep will print 5 context
103 lines.
104 • tree,t - Print the number of matches for each directory in the
106 tree.
107 • delete,d - Remove lines at selected indices from the results,
109 for the duration of the interactive shell (requires selec‐
110 tors).
111 • keep,k - Keep only lines at selected indices from the results,
113 for the duration of the interactive shell (requires selec‐
114 tors).
115 • refine,r - Keep only lines matching the provided regexp pat‐
117 tern from the results, for the duration of the interactive
118 shell (requires a regexp string).
119 • files,f - Print the number of matches for each file in the
121 tree.
122 • grep,g - Start a new search without leaving the interactive
124 shell (requires arguments for a vgrep search). For example, g
125 -i "foo bar" dir/ will trigger a case-insensitive search for
126 foo bar in the files under dir. The cache will be updated with
127 the results from the new search.
128 • quit,q - Exit the interactive shell.
130 • ? - Show the help for vgrep commands.
132
136 Print the number of matches for earch directory in the tree:
137 $ vgrep -stree
140 Matches Directory
141 37690
142 876 .
143 21 docs
144 5 hack
145 88 internal
146 15 internal/ansi
147 73 internal/colwriter
148 76 test
149 3 test/search_files
150 37500 vendor
151 Show one context line before and after each match:
155 $ vgrep -sc1
158 --- 0 .cirrus.yml ------------------------------------------------
159 5 GOPROXY: https://proxy.golang.org
160 6 CODECOV_TOKEN: ENCRYPTED[64481ea00b08c4703bf350a2ad3d5a6fd7a00269576784b2943cce62604798e88f532e19fb66859fa68f43dbd4a0df15]
161 7
162 --- 1 .goreleaser.yml ---------------------------------------------
163 1 before:
164 2 hooks:
165 --- 2 .goreleaser.yml ---------------------------------------------
166 15 amd64: x86_64
167 16 format: binary
168 17 checksum:
169pages man VGREP(1)(vgrep)