ngp: Find it and edit it, in one deft motion

These days I seem to be finding less and less tools that really grab me, and more and more that seem to fall short of the mark somehow. ngp is one of the former, and this one I think I shall keep around.

ngp is like a recursive, colorized, interactive grep. If you take the output of ack, make it navigable with a selection bar, then add the ability to jump straight into a selected file with your $EDITOR, you’ll have an idea of what ngp does.

So for example, this

 ngp -r ion

Takes me straight to this:

And from there, if I highlight a line and press enter, I jump into $EDITOR and can adjust as necessary. Leave the editor and ngp reclaims the terminal, showing the same results but with red text, so I know I already traveled there. Very smooth. 😎

ngp strikes me as a tool someone would invent where they see themselves repeating the same task over and over, and relying on two or three terminal windows to track their progress. And if you work in text files a lot, or through trees of code, I imagine ngp would save you some time finding certain problems, and fixing them.

ngp can be a little finicky, so watch your flags carefully. And I might have compared it to grep but it’s not feature-compatible, so don’t start throwing wild strings of flags at it and expecting it to munch them down the same way grep does.

But for a find-and-replace or find-and-edit or search-and-destroy at the console tool, ngp has everything tied up in one, nice, neat package. A well-earned, albeit completely valueless, K.Mandla gold star: ⭐ Enjoy! 😉