When it comes to searching on Linux, there are various options available to users. The two main players in search operations for, and inside, files are the find [1] and grep [2] command-line tools. While find searches for file name, age, size, and more, grep, which was developed by Unix co-developer Ken Thompson, is a specialist tool that focuses on processing data streams and pattern searching. Regular expressions (regexes) are often used as search patterns. Of course, not everyone is enthralled with the idea of zapping their brain with regexes, which prompted this article on Clapgrep, a variant of grep that has an easily accessible graphical user interface (GUI).

Clapgrep, which only saw the light of day at the start of 2025, has not yet made its way into most distribution archives, although it is available in the Arch Linux AUR. Clapgrep is also available as a Flatpak on Flathub [3]. Clapgrep's source code, which is licensed under GPLv3, is also available on GitHub [4]. However, you will need a very recent platform, such as Fedora Rawhide, to build the application from the source code, making the Flatpak option the approach of choice for the majority of users.

Searching with Clapgrep

Imagine you have a directory with hundreds or even thousands of files. You know that it contains some information that you need, but you have no idea which file the information is hiding in, not to mention which line. This is a typical case for grep or its derivative Ripgrep [5].

Ripgrep is the grep implementation in Rust. Clapgrep uses Ripgrep as the engine for actual searches in the background. Besides the faster speed that Rust achieves, Ripgrep offers many additional features such as multithreading, support for .gitignore, Unicode, and more efficient regex processing, but it is still a command-line tool.

While grep and Ripgrep are optimized for searching text files, Clapgrep also searches PDFs and Office documents. With Office documents, it additionally searches for metadata such as the page and line numbers; this is something that grep and Ripgrep cannot do directly. Future plans include other data types, such as ePubs and ZIP archives, or the ability to find screenshots. In addition, the developers are looking to use a cache for successive searches, with the extracted text to be stored in an SQLite database indexed with a hash of the file path and last change date. Finally, an AppImage in addition to the Flatpak is in the pipeline.

In Clapgrep's search options, you can disable regexes, enable case sensitivity, and include hidden and ignored files. Search results can be opened directly from the interface with a text editor to simplify the workflow. A progress bar provides information about the search progress, the number of files processed, and the number of hits.

Differences

Ripgrep, grep, and Clapgrep run and display their results differently. A typical, fairly simple search request with grep might look like Listing 1.

01 $ grep -r -n -i 'ripgrep' /home/ft/work/Linux-User/

Listing 1 searches for the term "ripgrep" in the Linux-User folder of the user's home directory (Figure 1). The -r parameter triggers a recursive search of the entire folder, -n outputs the line number of the search result, and -i finds both lowercase and uppercase terms.

Figure 1: grep outputs the term's location, followed by the line number, the search term, and the text of the line containing the term.

No Color

The same search request in Ripgrep does not require -r, as grep -r is called in the background. For color-highlighted output (Figure 2) with Ripgrep, you need to set the following alias:

alias grep='grep --color=auto'

Figure 2: Ripgrep and grep differ only slightly in terms of how the search query is formulated. Ripgrep does not display any colors unless you set an alias.

in the shell configuration (this is usually done in the .bashrc file). This avoids the need to specify the parameter each time you run the command. Ripgrep and its offshoot ripgrep-all [6] support more file formats than the original grep.

Clapgrep implements Ripgrep with an intuitive GUI for users who are not comfortable with the command line. Clapgrep's clear-cut GUI (Figure 3) offers only a few optional settings. You can limit the maximum number of search results and enable integration with Gnome's Nautilus file manager. Speaking of Gnome, Clapgrep is based on the GTK 4 GUI toolkit and the Libadwaita [7] Gnome design library, but it also meshes well with Qt-based desktops such as Plasma.

Figure 3: Clapgrep's GUI is clearly structured with minimal settings.

Defining a search query is very easy. Just enter the desired text or regular expression at the top in the search dialog box. As the search path, navigate to the folder you want Clapgrep to search. The file search dialog box has a filter for file names or file types to narrow down the search to specific files such as .txt or .pdf, boosting the search's efficiency and precision. In addition, you can include or exclude file names, PDFs, and Office files at the bottom. Figure 4 shows the results of a search for linux.

Figure 4: Clapgrep displays more information than the command-line tools. It provides information about the number of files searched, the number of matches, and any errors.

The GUI displays the search results clearly and provides more information than the command-line tools. However, only UTF-8 is currently implemented cleanly for encoding. Work on support for other encoding types for Ripgrep is already in progress, which will then also work in Clapgrep.

In Figure 4, the application searched through 4,817 files and found the search term, linux, 213 times. Another advantage of Clapgrep becomes apparent when you click on the search terms highlighted in blue in the results. Clapgrep then offers to open the corresponding match directly and suggests several applications to help you do this (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Depending on the search result's file type, Clapgrep suggests various applications to let you open it directly without leaving the application.