Grep is just as good, and with the recent order of magnitude speed improvement on non-C locales that they made -- see https://lwn.net/Articles/586899/ -- which may not have made its way into distros yet, it's easily the best option.
I have a simple wrapper over egrep (see https://github.com/sitaramc/ew ) that adds those little extras (ignoring binary files, ignoring VCS directories...).
I'm sure it's improved since the days I tried it, but I tend to be permanently prejudiced against tools where the author can't/won't document the file selection logic and says "there's really no English that explains how it works" when someone asks.
I have a simple wrapper over egrep (see https://github.com/sitaramc/ew ) that adds those little extras (ignoring binary files, ignoring VCS directories...).
I'm sure it's improved since the days I tried it, but I tend to be permanently prejudiced against tools where the author can't/won't document the file selection logic and says "there's really no English that explains how it works" when someone asks.