It's fast. really fast.

Some grep alternatives try to be fast by not searching everywhere. sift was developed with performance in mind and just is fast.

Take a look at the benchmarks for details.

No installation. just download a single file.

sift comes as a single executable with no dependencies and is available for all major platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, BSD)

Need to use sift on a remote server? Just copy it over and it will work - no problems due to missing packages.

Flexiblity. all the features you expect from a modern grep alternative.

RegEx

perl compatible regular expression format (no more escape hell)

usable defaults

basic options known from grep but with usable defaults

target selection

select or exclude search targets based on file name, directory name, path and type

gitignore support

sift understands .gitignore files and can be configured to only show results in relevant files

multiline support

find matches spanning over multiple lines

replace

replace output to reformat it to your needs without relying on awk/sed

gzip files

search through normal and gzip'ed files in one program call

handling big data

sift handles big files without problems: files >50GB, >5,000,000,000 lines and >5,000,000,000 matches successfully tested

multiple patterns

search for multiple patterns in one run

customizable

optional global and local configuration file to specify your own preferences:

• search case insensitive
• respect .gitignore files
• limit maximum output line length
• skip binary files
• ... and many more

Use Conditions. grep on the next level.

Doing code audits? Need to extract data from complex formats? sift will make this much easier.

You may specify various conditions and only get matches...

• preceded by A
• followed by B within X lines
• if the file also contains a line with C
• if the file contains D in the first Y lines
• any combination of the available conditions
• ...

Take a look at the samples and documentation to find out more about these features.