Comment on Hister - Your Own Search Engine
activistPnk@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
I currently use the find-grep function in emacs, which is basically: find . -type f -exec grep ‘my.*search.*pattern’ {} +
To do PDFs, I use something like find . -type f -iname \*pdf -exec pdfgrep ‘my.*search.*pattern’ {} +
My problem is generally when TOKEN1<space>TOKEN2 has a line break between tokens. It’s fucking annoying that grep is line-by-line. I wonder if Hister solves that problem. But from the website, I see no advanced syntax. I would love to search a pattern like word1 w/s word2, which would find cases where word1 and word2 appear in the same sentence. And word1 w/p word2 to match cases where two words are in the same paragraph.
cravl@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Replacing line breaks with nulls first is an option. That’s a lot of extra processing for very large blocks of text though.
Using regular grep is possible with the right flags, or you could also use
pcre2grepwith the-Mflag, which should be available on every distro nowadays. See this Stack Overflow article for details.