igrepper - The interactive grepper

Filter and explore text with instant feedback. The regex is re-evaluated at every keypress. Also useful for quickly developing and testing regular expressions.

Installation

Either:

1. Download binary
   To install without setting up a rust environment, grab the igrepper binary from the latest release: https://github.com/igoyak/igrepper/releases
   Then make it executable with chmod and put it in your PATH.

2. Install using cargo
   cargo install igrepper

3. Build and run from source code
   cargo run

Dependencies

Ubuntu: apt-get install xsel for clipboard support

Usage

Recommended .bashrc additions:

alias i='igrepper'
iman() {
  man "$1" | igrepper --context 3
}

Read input from pipe:

dmesg | i

Read input from file:

i /etc/fstab

Create a grep command using ctrl-g:

See context around matches:

Reload the file as it changes (similar to tail -f):

i -f somefile.log

Commands:

Edit the current regex by typing.

Movement:

Command	Action
Up/Down/Left/Right/PageUp/PageDown	Scroll
ctrl-u/ctrl-d	Half-page scroll

Searching:

Command	Action
ctrl-n/ctrl-j/Enter	Accept current regex, start a sub-search
ctrl-p	Revert sub-search
ctrl-i	Toggle case sensitivity
ctrl-v	Toggle inverted
ctrl-r/ctrl-t	Decrease/Increase context-lines

Exporting:

Command	Action
ctrl-e	Copy current match to clipboard
ctrl-g	Copy equivalent grep command to clipboard
F1	Pipe current match to the configured external editor
(Inside vim) F1	Pipe current buffer to igrepper (add map <F1> :silent :w !igrepper<CR>:q!<CR> to your .vimrc)

Configuration

External editor

Set the environment variable IGREPPER_EDITOR to a command and arguments, separated by whitespace, to customize which editor is used when pressing F1. The command must support reading from STDIN.

Example .bashrc configuration:

export IGREPPER_EDITOR="vim -R -" # vim in read-only mode (default)
export IGREPPER_EDITOR="code -" # vscode
export IGREPPER_EDITOR="nano -v -" # nano in read-only mode

Supported platforms

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04

Known issues

• No unicode support
• Broken colors when using screen/tmux and urxvt. As a workaround, you can either:
  • Run export TERM=rxvt-unicode-256color
  • Add term screen-256color to your .screenrc

Dev dependencies

Ubuntu: apt-get install libncurses-dev

Release build

cargo build --release cargo publish