xgrep

Ultra-fast indexed code search engine with MCP server for AI coding tools.

Pre-builds a trigram inverted index, then searches in milliseconds. Designed for repeated searches on large codebases — by humans and AI agents alike.

Features

• Indexed search — trigram inverted index makes repeated searches 2-46x faster than ripgrep
• File discovery — --find mode locates files 2-15x faster than fd
• MCP server — built-in Model Context Protocol server for AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.)
• LLM-optimized output — --format llm produces Markdown with language tags, context lines, and token-aware truncation
• Git-aware — search only changed files (--changed), recent commits (--since 1h), respects .gitignore
• Zero config — install via cargo/npm/pip, then xg "pattern". Index builds automatically on first search
• Always fresh — files edited since the last index build are rescanned on every search; on Linux, xg serve watches the tree so this check costs ~0.1ms
• Syntax-aware — tree-sitter outlines (--outline), enclosing-block results (--expand block), definitions, references and a repo map for Rust, Python, JS/TS, Go, Java, C/C++ and Ruby
• Boolean and history search — file-level --and / --not, search inside git diff (--in-diff) or commit messages (--log)

Why xgrep?

xgrep is not a ripgrep replacement. Use ripgrep for one-off searches. Use xgrep when you search the same codebase repeatedly — the index pays for itself after ~2 searches.

Installation

Choose your package manager:

# Rust (recommended — native binary, no runtime)
cargo install xgrep-search    # Requires Rust 1.85+

# npm (Node.js 18+)
npm install -g xgrep

# pip (Python 3.8+)
pip install xgrep-search

Prebuilt binaries are also available on the Releases page.

The cargo build and the release binaries include tree-sitter grammars for the syntax-aware features (--outline, --expand block, outline/find_references/repo_map over MCP), which need a C compiler to build and add ~12MB to the binary. To leave them out, use cargo install xgrep-search --no-default-features; the npm and pip packages are built this way.

Quick Start

xg "pattern"                  # Search (auto-builds index on first run)

Usage

xg "pattern"                  # Smart-case search (all-lowercase = case-insensitive)
xg "Pattern"                  # Mixed/upper case in pattern = case-sensitive
xg "pattern" -i               # Force case-insensitive
xg "pattern" -s               # Force case-sensitive (disable smart-case)
xg "pattern" /path/to/repo    # Search a specific directory
xg -e "handle_\w+"            # Regex search
xg "pattern" -w               # Match whole words only
xg "pattern" -t rs            # Filter by file type
xg "pattern" -C 3             # Context lines (symmetric)
xg "pattern" -A 2 -B 1        # 2 lines after, 1 line before
xg "pattern" -g "*.rs"        # Include only paths matching glob (repeatable)
xg "pattern" -g "!*_test.rs"  # Exclude paths matching glob (! prefix)
xg "pattern" --format llm     # Markdown output for LLMs
xg "pattern" --format llm --max-tokens 4000  # Cap LLM output (approx. tokens)
xg "pattern" -M 200           # Cut lines longer than 200 chars (--max-columns)
xg "pattern" --json           # JSON Lines: one object per match + summary
xg "pattern" --changed        # Only git changed files
xg "pattern" --fresh          # Rebuild a very stale index before searching
xg "foo" --and bar --not test # Files containing foo and bar but not test
xg "pattern" --in-diff main...HEAD  # Only lines added/removed in a git diff
xg "pattern" --log            # Search commit messages
xg "pattern" --expand block   # Show the enclosing function/class per match
xg --outline src/lib.rs       # List symbols without bodies
xg "pattern" dir1 dir2        # Search several paths
cat app.log | xg "error"      # Search standard input (also: xg "error" -)
xg "pattern" --exclude vendor  # Exclude paths containing "vendor"
xg "pattern" --absolute-paths # Show absolute paths
xg "pattern" --no-hints       # Suppress regex pattern hints
xg --find "*.rs"              # Find files by glob pattern
xg --list-types               # Show supported file types
xg status                     # Show index status
xg init                       # Explicitly rebuild index

Without a PATH, xg searches standard input when it is a pipe or a file with data; otherwise (a terminal, /dev/null, NUL, or empty input as CI runners often attach) it searches the current directory. - always reads standard input. Matches are shown as :LINE:TEXT.

Search is smart-case by default: an all-lowercase pattern matches case-insensitively, while any uppercase letter makes the search case-sensitive. Use -i or -s to override (priority: -i > -s > smart-case).

Environment Variables

Run xg --help for all options.

MCP Server

xgrep runs as an MCP server, giving AI coding tools fast indexed search.

xg serve                        # Start MCP server
xg serve --root /path/to/repo   # Specific directory

Claude Code

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "xgrep": {
      "command": "xg",
      "args": ["serve"]
    }
  }
}

Available tools: search (ranked, paginated, multi-query, expand:"block"), find_definitions, find_references, find_files, outline, repo_map, read_file, index_status, build_index, session_reset

Results already returned in the session are collapsed to one line (already shown: path:L10-40), and every tool honours max_tokens.

See docs/agents.md for agent-oriented usage patterns.

Performance

Measurement environment (tables below): Apple M4, 32GB RAM, NVMe SSD, macOS 15. Warm filesystem cache, hyperfine --warmup 5 --runs 20. Results on other hardware — especially shared Linux machines or HDD — will differ; see Reproducibility below.

The Linux kernel, next.js and index-cost tables below were measured with v0.7 (index format v3) and have not been re-run for the current index format (v4).

Search: Linux kernel (92,947 files, 2.0GB)

The queries above were selected for xgrep’s sweet spot (trigram index filters well). For distributed patterns that appear across most files, xgrep approaches ripgrep speed — see the Reproducibility section for honest numbers.

File discovery: next.js (27,332 files)

Index cost

First run includes a one-time index build. See docs/benchmarks.md for full results including medium/small repos.

v0.7 → current, same machine

crates.io registry sources (13,818 files, 361MB), WSL2 on a 28-core machine, warm cache, median of 5 runs:

Lowercased trigrams with per-posting position/next-byte masks cut candidate files that do not match by ~77%.

Reproducibility

The numbers above were measured on the author’s Apple M4 with a warm filesystem cache. Third-party benchmarks on shared Linux machines (different CPU, spinning disk, cold cache) show a different picture depending on pattern type:

The pattern: when trigram intersection leaves many candidate files (widely-used symbols), xgrep must scan nearly the whole codebase — the index overhead then outweighs the savings. This is a known limitation being investigated. Use bench/fair-bench.sh to measure on your own hardware; the script runs both focused and distributed queries for a complete picture.

Limitations

• Single-character queries bypass the index (full scan) — no speed advantage over ripgrep; 2-character literals use a coarser trigram-prefix lookup
• Large files (> 10MB by default) are left out of the index; xg status, MCP index_status and zero-result hints report how many. Set XGREP_MAX_FILESIZE (e.g. 50M, or 0 for no limit) and rebuild to index them
• Binary files (any NUL byte, including UTF-16 text) are not indexed
• Freshness — edited files are rescanned on each search; with more than 500 changed files the search warns and relies on the background rebuild (--fresh rebuilds first)
• Syntax features cover Rust, Python, JS/TS, Go, Java, C/C++ and Ruby; other languages fall back to regex heuristics. The npm and Python packages are built without them
• find_references is text-based: different symbols with the same name are not told apart

When to use ripgrep instead: one-off searches, very small codebases (< 100 files), or single-character queries.

How It Works

1. Index Build: Walks the codebase, extracts ASCII-lowercased 3-byte trigrams from each file, and builds an inverted index with delta+varint compression plus a 2-byte mask per posting (position mod 8, next-byte bloom)
2. Search: Intersects the rarest posting lists first, prunes candidates with the masks, then verifies matches in the files, streaming results in path order
3. Freshness: Files changed since the build (found by a parallel stat probe, or by the file watcher in xg serve) are excluded from the index scan and searched directly
4. MCP Server: Exposes search, syntax tools and file reading via JSON-RPC over stdio, with ranking, pagination, token budgets and session dedup

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and guidelines.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or )
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or )

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.