maybe I did not had this problem yet... if I used grep on linux sources I would just skip the build folder and it usually works flawless (cannot even recall whe

maybe I did not had this problem yet... if I used grep on linux sources I would just skip the build folder and it usually works flawless (cannot even recall when was it too slow unless grepping over binary data). Do you refer maybe to deep interdependent javascript projects in which a small library requires hundreds of MB in dependencies? How many Gb have your projects and how many lines? Please include deps & builds (my current project is a small python one, 1.8Gb with deps, and I would usually grep only over the same folders all the time): $ time find ./ -type f -print|wc -l 140197 real 0m0.626s user 0m0.165s sys 0m0.473s Anyway, if it is about grepping over several gigabytes of unstructured code and there is no chance to have a better tool to index everything that could be a use case.