Examples

Find a forgotten database command

You fixed a Postgres issue weeks ago. The command is buried in history:

devgrep postgres timeout

In the TUI, select the result and press enter to re-run the history command, or y to copy it.

Deployment steps

devgrep deploy nginx restart

Recover compose commands

devgrep docker compose postgres
devgrep --plain search "docker compose" --source history

Index a project before searching logs

devgrep index ~/projects/auth-api --dry-run
devgrep index ~/projects/auth-api

Find how you ran a script last time

devgrep npm run build

History indexing captures npm, pnpm, and yarn invocations like any other shell command. Pair with directory relevance scoring to surface commands from the current project first.

Find connection errors

devgrep search --source logs "connection refused"
devgrep search --source logs --severity ERROR "timeout"

Live tail with regex

devgrep search --source logs --tail --regex "ERROR|WARN"

Tail mode streams matching log lines from indexed paths. Use --regex when the pattern differs from the search query string.

Search runbooks and checklists

# add ~/notes to config indexed_paths, then:
devgrep index
devgrep postgres recovery

Notes appear as [note] in results. The preview pane shows file context when the markdown file still exists.

Pipe plain output

devgrep --plain search "migration failed" | head -5
devgrep --plain search "kube" --source history,logs -n 10

CI-safe indexing

devgrep index . --no-watch --yes

Use --no-watch in CI or cron. Pass --yes only when indexing paths that would otherwise require interactive confirmation.