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.






pcregrepis not automatically installed with Debian but it’s in the official repos. It seems common to get:pcregrep: Too many errors - abandoned. pcregrep: Error -8, -21 or -27 means that a resource limit was exceeded. pcregrep: Check your regex for nested unlimited loops.But it will help in many cases. I can see that it works on sufficiently small files. I noticed the built-in grep function for emacs can be modified to use pcregrep w/-M added instead of grep, which I find quite important because emacs makes it very easy to jump around to visit different results. In the end it’s still a hack.