Simple and nice grep front-end: happygrep

While grep is a powerful command line tool, it is difficult to use So for the convenient of human being, we need a more smart tool to do our work.

happygrep is a small and nice grep front-end based on ncursesw TUI. Its internal command is grep used to find all the matching text line containing specific strings, then displaying them in the ncursesw window. So you can view the results with ease.

Installation (Ubuntu)

Since the application is dependent on ncursesw library, so we need to install the library firstly, otherwise it can't be compiled successfully :

sudo apt-get install libncursesw5 libncursesw5-dev 

Basic GitHub Checkout

This will get you going with the latest version of happygrep and make it easy to fork and contribute any changes back upstream.

1. Check out the code

    $ git clone git://github.com/happygrep/happygrep.git 
   

2. Then compile and install it.

    $ cd ~/happypeter/
    $ make
    $ sudo make install
   

Usage

By default, happygrep skips the .git directory, and it supports regular expression, it is grep Anyway. In addition, happygrep can specify one directory to ignore. The directory name can use regex.

For instance, we want to search the string hello world in a gitrepository calledtechdoc`, we can do like this:

happygrep "hello world"

Also, you can ignore a directory named image/:

happygrep "hello world" "image"

After running the commands above respectively, then you will get a nice window based text user interface.

• use j and k (or up/down arrows) to select the entry listed in window

• type e character to open the file where the proper entry appeared

• edit the opened file in vim editor

• close vim to return to the original window to continue

• type q character to quit

Development

Please feel free to submit pull requests and file bugs on the issue tracker.

Contributors

• happypeter (author)

• billie66

License

(The MIT license)

Copyright (c) 2011 happpypeter