Veigrep

Veigrep is a free and open-source command-line tool for searching text within files. It is designed as a fast and flexible search utility, suitable for large repositories, log archives, and data collections. The project aims to combine the simplicity of traditional search tools with modern performance techniques, including multithreading and efficient scanning, while maintaining compatibility with standard regular expressions and common command-line options.

Veigrep's development is driven by an open-source community that seeks a practical alternative to legacy tools. The software is implemented in Rust to emphasize memory safety and performance and is released under a permissive license, enabling broad use in personal, educational, and commercial contexts. The project maintains a public repository with issue tracking, contribution guidelines, and regular releases.

Features of Veigrep include:

- Multithreaded search and SIMD-accelerated scanning where available

- Unicode-aware matching and normalization

- Support for PCRE-like and standard regular expressions

- Recursive directory traversal with ignore file support (.veignore)

- Contextual output, including line numbers and colorized highlights

- Streaming input and file-type filtering; optional support for reading compressed sources

Usage and syntax notes:

Basic usage involves specifying one or more patterns and a path, for example: veigrep -n -e "pattern" path/

Multiple patterns can be provided with repeated -e options, and results can be piped or redirected as needed. Patterns can be combined with standard operators, and output can be customized with common flags for color, case sensitivity, and context.

Availability and platform support:

Veigrep is available as prebuilt binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and can be built from source on most platforms. It ships with a lightweight runtime and avoids heavy external dependencies beyond the standard Rust toolchain.

See also: grep, ripgrep, the Silver Searcher, ag.