Free alternative(s) to PowerGREP
I would suggest trying the new dnGrep, it's a .NET application that provides grep-like functionality and has almost all the features you specified.
Here are the features and a sample screenshot:
- Shell integration (ability to search from explorer)
- Plain text/regex/XPath search (including case-insensitive search)
- Phonetic search (using Bitap and Needleman-Wunch algorithms)
- File move/copy/delete actions
- Search inside archives (via plug-in)
- Search MS Word documents (via plug-in)
- Search PDF documents (via plug-in)
- Undo functionality
- Optional integration with text editor (like notepad++)
- Bookmarks (ability to save regex searches for the future)
- Pattern test form
- Search result highlighting
- Search result preview
- Does not require installation (can be run from USB drive)
Feature-wise nothing even comes close to PowerGREP, so the question is, how many compromises are you willing to make? I agree that PowerGREP's price tag is a bit steep (not that I have ever regretted a single penny I spent on it), so perhaps something cheaper might do?
UltraEdit is an excellent text editor with very good regex support. It supports Perl-style regular expressions, and you can do find/replace operations in multiple (optionally pre-filtered) files with it. I'd say it can do everything you want to do according to your question.
RegexBuddy, apart from being the best regex editor/debugger on the market, also has a limited GREP functionality, allowing search/replace in (pre-filtered) subdirectories. It's also not free, but considerably less expensive than PowerGREP, and its regex engine has all the features you could ask for (the current version even introduced recursive regexes, and the extremely useful ability to translate regexes between flavors). Big pluses here are the ability to do a non-desctructive preview for all operations, and to have backups automatically be created of all files that are modified during a grep.
