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Best for: Programmers searching large source trees from the terminal |
Best for: Finding a phrase you remember somewhere in a folder of PDFs and documents |
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Free Free and open source. |
Free Free and open source under the AGPL. |
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Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line |
Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line |
- Built for searching source code rather than general text
- Full Perl regular expressions
All 3 strengths for ack- Built for searching source code rather than general text
- Full Perl regular expressions
- Boolean --and, --or and --not options
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- Searches PDFs, Office documents, EPUBs, SQLite databases and subtitles, not just text
- Descends recursively into archives and matches inside them
All 4 strengths for ripgrep-all- Searches PDFs, Office documents, EPUBs, SQLite databases and subtitles, not just text
- Descends recursively into archives and matches inside them
- Keeps ripgrep's speed and regex syntax
- Integrates with fzf for interactive searching across a document collection
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- Needs a Perl interpreter
- Newer tools such as ripgrep are typically faster on very large trees
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- Depends on external tools such as pandoc, poppler-utils and ffmpeg for the adapters
- First run over a large collection is slow until the cache is built
All 4 limitations for ripgrep-all- Depends on external tools such as pandoc, poppler-utils and ffmpeg for the adapters
- First run over a large collection is slow until the cache is built
- On Windows the project states Chocolatey or Scoop are the only supported install methods
- Extraction quality is only as good as the underlying converter
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Downloadable app |
Downloadable app |
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Open source |
Open source |
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License: Artistic-2.0 |
License: AGPL-3.0 |
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No account needed |
No account needed |
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Offline features available |
Offline features available |
Sources for ackCatalog checked September 23, 2026 |
Sources for ripgrep-allCatalog checked September 21, 2026 |
ack
ripgrep-all