An easy-to-use, open-source Linux app for searching your PDFs and text documents

Manually searching the contents of a text file can be tiring if you have to do it regularly and across many files.

This is where tools like grep, pdfgrep, and ripgrep-all come into play, serving as a more efficient way to search for information, allowing quick and easy searches for specific keywords, strings, or patterns.

However, they are all CLI-based tools.

How about a GUI based solution? I found one and it’s called Clap grepwhich looks appealing due to its minimal, straightforward experience. So join me as I walk you through the latest app of the week.

Clapgrep: Super-fast text search

As a Rust and Python based application, Clapgrep a powerful open source search tool for Linux This allows multiple file types to be searched in a specific directory.

It is a GUI frontend for Ripgrep.

If you look closely, the app’s logo and name are derived from Claptrap, the loud-mouthed robots from the Borderlands series of games (The film doesn’t count).

⭐ Key Features

Clapgrep provides quick searches for text, PDFs, and common Office document files, displaying relevant metadata such as page and line numbers after a successful search query.

Some of its highlights include:

• Supports regex
• Actively developed
• Intuitive user interface

💻 User experience

I ran it on my Fedora 40 system with the official Flatpak without any problems. The interface was easy to learn and the search results were fairly easy to understand.

After setting a search path where some demo text files were saved, I searched for the term “crazy” and Clapgrep found the file and the lines in which this term was mentioned. I could even open the file directly by clicking on the title and selecting one of the installed text editors.

Then I took it a step further by saying “Pay attention to upper and lower case letters“Search option” and gave the term “What is the dog doing?“. Clapgrep showed me the exact lines where this term was mentioned in a text file.

Searching for code is also straightforwardwith a special “Disable regex” Option to disable regular expression search. As you can see below, I had to disable it to search for a specific line in a Python file for a Snake game.

In my tests, I missed EPUB support. It would have been great if Clapgrep could do that. This would make searching for passages in a book much easier.

I highly recommend this application to users who prefer a GUI app over a terminal app.

⚙️ Install Clapgrep on Linux

The latest version of Clapgrep can be found on Flathub. The GitHub repo contains the source code for those who want to build manually or contribute to the project.

Recommended reading 📖

ripgrep-all command in Linux: One grep to rule them all

RGA, called Ripgrep-All, is an excellent tool that allows you to search almost all files for a text pattern. While the OG grep command is limited to plain text files, rga can search for text in a wide range of file types such as PDF, eBooks, Word documents, ZIP, TAR, etc

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