alfred-grep

An Alfred workflow for:

• searching for directory trees with a regular expression against the file name like the find command.
• searching for lines matching a regular expression like the grep command.
• opening the matching files or lines directly in your text editor such as MacVim, Emacs, Sublime Text, and TextMate

Requirements

• Alfred Powerpack
• OS X Mavericks or higher (Ruby 1.9.3 or higher)
• Text editor which allows you to open a file and go to a specific line

Install

1. Download and open the workflow
2. Review the workflow to add custom hotkeys. An example is shown below:

• ctrl+command+/ Run the workflow with last query
• ctrl+command+j Find Next
• ctrl+command+k Find Previous

Usage

In Alfred's File Actions, select grep to specify where the workflow searches for files in.

The contents of the directory are listed when the query is empty.

You can search for names of files as well as lines of files with a pattern.

Whitespace-separated multiple patterns are treated as AND search.

To open the results with your text editor, just select it.

By default, Sublime Text will be launched. To change the default application, edit settings.json in the workflow directory.

Advanced usage

List only directories

The --d flag means selecting only directories.

A string starting with -- will be treated as the search options. You can write it everywhere in the query.

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List only files

The --f flag means selecting only files.

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List files recursively

The --r flag means searching subdirectories recursively.

To specify multiple options, just add the character of the option without spaces. Or you can specify the options separately like --r --f.

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Selecting files by extension

The pattern is an unquoted string like h, or is a regular expression literal like /.../. It is optionally followed by the flag which determines the search target like -x.

The -x flag means "search for file extensions with that pattern".

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Files containing the pattern in their path

The -p flag means "search for file paths with that pattern".

This example selects the files where their extensions contain "h" and their paths contain "gl/".

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Lines containing the pattern

To do grep, type the pattern optionally followed by the -g flag.

You can specify multiple search targets to one pattern. When those are omitted, the flags -pg meaning "search for file paths or lines with that pattern" will be used implicitly.

Note that the multiple search targets are handled as "short circuit OR". The contents of a file will not be searched if the path matches the pattern.

To search for only lines with the pattern, add an explicit -g flag.

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Using regular expression

Regular expression pattern is also available by using the /.../ literal.

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Files containing the pattern in their contents

The -c flag means "search for file contents with that pattern".

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Exclude pattern

The -! flag means "exclude pattern".

Note that /foo/ -pg! is expanded as /foo/ -p! /foo/ -g!.

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Pattern flags

Case sensitivity [i|I]

• -i Ignore case
• -I Case sensitive

Filename matching [p|n|b|x]

• -p Search for file path like bar/foo.txt
• -n Search for file name like foo.txt
• -b Search for file basename like foo
• -x Search for file extension like txt

OpenMeta Tags matching [t]

• -t Search for file tags using OpenMeta

Full-text matching [c|g]

• -c Search for file contents
• -g Search for lines of files

Excluding [!]

• -! Exclude pattern

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Search options

Recursiveness [r|l]

• --r Search subdirectories recursively
• --l Non-recursive search

File Types [d|f|e]

• --d List directories
• --f List files
• --e List any type of files

File Visibility [v|h|a]

• --v List visible files
• --h List hidden files
• --a List all files

Sorting [n|x|s|m][g|u]

• --n Sort by file name
• --x Sort by file extension
• --s Sort by file size
• --m Sort by modification time
• --g Show direct child files of the search paths to the head of the results
• --u Turn off the above feature

Line Visibility [A]

• --A Show all lines of matching files