Thoughts have crossed my mind, but it's a wickedly hard problem. My personal opinion is that once you start trying to solve the problem you're describing, then

Thoughts have crossed my mind, but it's a wickedly hard problem. My personal opinion is that once you start trying to solve the problem you're describing, then you really start to venture away from "line oriented searcher" to "code aware searcher" in a way that invites a lot of trade offs. The most important trade off is probably maintenance or complexity of the code. In particular, in order to better show results, I kind of feel like the search tool needs to know something about what it's showing. Right? How else do you intelligently pick the context window for each search result? For code, maybe it's the surrounding function, for example. The grep -C crutch (which is also available in ripgrep) is kind of the best I've got for the moment for a strictly line oriented searcher. `git grep` has some interesting bits in it that will actually try to look for the enclosing the function and emit that as context. I think it's the `-p/--show-function` flag. ... But that doesn't really help with your log files. In any case, I am very interested in this path and even have an issue on the ripgrep tracker for it: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues/95 https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues/95 --- I'm not sure if it really belongs in ripgrep proper, but I would really love to collect user stories. If you have any, that would be great. Examples of what you'd like the search results to look like would be great!