I also hacked up a tool for structural search. I'd noticed intellij's built-in structural search has a very simple pattern language - you just type the code you

I also hacked up a tool for structural search. I'd noticed intellij's built-in structural search has a very simple pattern language - you just type the code you're searching for and insert a wildcard like $x$ or $foo$ where an expression can vary. However, its restricted to the languages Intellij can parse. (in what follows HN is mangling asterisks, so I used 'X') Tokenizing a language is much simpler though. So I just did that, and let wildcards match like <token>X? up to the next expression boundary at the same nesting level - the boundaries were ',' ';' ')' '}' and ']' when I tried this on java, C and perl. This turns out to be simple enough and powerful enough to be useful. For instance, your example: boost::bind(& ${id} $( :: ${id} )+, $( boost::ref( Xthis ) )|ref| $.X ) Would be: boost::bind(& $id1$ :: $id2$, boost::ref( Xthis ) ) (for 2 args - I'd need to repeat for more args like so: boost::bind(& $id1$ :: $id2$, boost::ref( Xthis ), $id3$) This works because $id1$ is non-greedy, and whitespace is ignored. I did tend to tweak the tool to what I was searching for (I'd have dropped ',' as a delimiter for this one), which I guess is cheating on keeping the syntax simple!