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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to zfind – CLI like find but using SQL syntax and also does tar/zip

I wrote this because I needed to search a lot of files, including some archives, for files in a date range but couldn't find any good tools. Also I never liked find's option syntax. I think most people already know SQL (or at least it's easier to learn) and a much better match for this task.

zfind is a command-line file search tool that uses SQL syntax instead of traditional find commands. It searches files across the system and within archives like tar and zip files. The tool is designed for developers… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. zfind – CLI like find but using SQL syntax and also does tar/zip launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find' - sharkdp/fd

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN community, I’m Zach, founder and CEO of Warp, and am excited to show you Warp, a fast Rust-based terminal that’s easy to use and built for teams. As of today, Warp is in public beta and any Mac user can download it. It works with bash, zsh, and fish. The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive. After 20 years of programming, I still find it hard to copy a command’s output; I always forget how to use `tar`; and I always have to relearn how to move my cursor. To fix fundamental accessibility issues, I believe we need to start innovating on the terminal,…

    2022 · warp.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3SC
  4. 4

    Hi HN! I wrote a small program to browse folders in the terminal. The main inspiration was type-ahead search in GUI file managers. There exist several programs that are similar (see the listing in the README), but none of them do it quite the way I like, and often they have a very complex UI and a ton of features. I tried to make something that is obvious how to use and gets out of your way. (I also wanted an excuse to learn Rust.) Let me know what you think!

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Create an index on a compressed text file. Contribute to mattgodbolt/zindex development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6AP

    After having cycled through various CLI-based todo apps, I started to realise that I actually don’t need a tool at all for managing my todos. Most of the time, my use cases are quite simple, like viewing my todo items, checking them off, or adding a new one. Rather than having to memorise CLI commands for these interactions (which I’m not super good at), I figured that it’s easier for me to use my text editor directly, and have an editor plugin help me with the visual structure and some convenience functionality. So, kind-of similar to Emacs Org Mode, but without having to use Emacs. I…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hello, I would like to share a Rust implementation of the Zstandard seekable format I've been working on. Regular zstd compressed files consist of a single frame, meaning you have to start decompression at the beginning. The seekable format splits compressed data into a series of independent frames, each compressed individually, so that decompression of a section in the middle of an archive only requires zstd to decompress at most a frame's worth of extra data, instead of the entire archive. I started working with the seekable format because I wanted to resume downloads of big zstd…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8RR

    rga is a line-oriented search tool that allows you to look for a regex in a multitude of file types. rga wraps the awesome ripgrep and enables it to search in pdf, docx, sqlite, jpg, zip, tar.*, movie subtitles (mkv, mp4), etc. ExamplesPDFs Say you have a large folder of papers or lecture slides,

    2019 · phiresky.github.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Search for files using a fun query language. Contribute to kashav/fsql development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I initially built cs (codespelunker) as a way to answer the question, can BM25 relevance search work without building an index? Turns out it can, and so I iterated on the idea, building it into a full CLI tool. Recently I wanted to improve it by adding relevance of tools like Sourcegraph or Zoekt but again without adding an index. cs uses scc https://github.com/boyter/scc to understand the structure of the file on the fly. As such it can filter searches to code, comments or strings. It also applies a weighted BM25 algorithm where matches in actual code rank higher than…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi everyone! I’m excited to open source GritQL, a Rust CLI for searching and transforming source code. GritQL comes from my experiences with conducting large scale refactors and migrations. Usually, I would start exploring a codebase with grep. This is easy to start with, but most migrations end up accumulating additional requirements like ensuring the right packages are imported and excluding cases which don’t have a viable migration path. Eventually, to build a complex migration, I usually ended up having to write a full codemod program with a tool like jscodeshift. This comes with its own…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12DB

    My partner reviews a lot of P&IDs (piping and instrumentation diagrams) and the adjacent files involved (excel, docx, pdfs, acd/l5x, etc). In his company, these are usually done in Bluebeam. It's really hard to see the diff + keep track of all the revisions resulted by these iterations. They end up storing files like "rev3_final_redlined.pdf". We've been looking for something close to Github to do these reviews, but haven't found one easy enough for folks with no CLI experience to understand and use (happy to check out more tools if you know any). So I built withkord.com to help with…

    Aug 2026 · withkord.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13FS

    Hi HN! This started late last year as an afternoon project to play around with ElasticSearch, and then I kept thinking of new features I wanted to add. I still have a lot of things I want to build, but now seemed like a good time to put it out there: even if the results aren’t nearly the quality I’d like, I’ve still found it useful and I want to show it off! I’ve been working on it since September 2021, but only in fits and starts. The entire thing runs on a computer in my living room (there’s a picture on the About page); I haven’t done any load testing so we’ll see how it holds up.

    2022 · search.feep.dev · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    zmd▲128

    Access handy utilities in your terminal

    2023 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Think interactive grep for text files, PDFs, DOCXs, etc, but word/token based instead of regex and line based, so you can search across lines easily. Docfd aims to provide good UX via integration with common text editors and PDF viewers, so you can jump directly to a search result with a single key press. --- I originally wrote this tool to help me dig through text/markdown notes, since very often I want to search for a phrase of sorts that may span across multiple lines, but constructing the corresponding multiline regex is a bit painful (especially painful if I want to account…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Facad is about functionality, not just aesthetics. Key features: - Intuitive file type representation - Smart sorting (directories first, then by extension) - Four-column layout for quick directory analysis It evolved from this alias: alias ls='ls -A -F --group-directories-first --sort=extension --color=always' Facad takes this concept further, offering more flexibility and visual clarity.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17GF

    I kept re-Googling the same flags, so I built a tiny, fast directory of copy-ready CLI commands. It’s static (vanilla JS), instant search, keyboard nav (↑/↓ + Enter), favorites (localStorage), and linkable queries. Examples: • grep errors → https://www.greppers.com/?q=grep%20error%20logs • list open ports (macOS) → https://www.greppers.com/?q=list%20open%20ports • show git branch graph → https://www.greppers.com/?q=git%20graph • tail with colors → https://www.greppers.com/?q=tail%20colors Tech notes: static site on Netlify, no…

    2025 · greppers.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A SQL spreadsheet desktop app that queries and visualizes CSV files using SQL.

    2021 · superintendent.app · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    zsv+lib: tabular data swiss-army knife CLI + world's fastest (simd) CSV parser - liquidaty/zsv

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    An alternative to elastic search requiring minimal resources

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi everyone! I've been working on a web search interface for Python's documentation as a personal project, and I think it's ready for other people to use... Please give it a go (and join me in praying to the server gods): https://pythondocs.xyz/ Here's the tech stack for those interested: - Parser: Beautiful Soup + Mozilla Bleach - Database: in-memory SQLite (aiosqlite) + SQLAlchemy - Web server: FastAPI + Uvicorn + Jinja2 - Front end: Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js I have ideas for future improvements but hopefully the current version is useful to someone. Let me know what…

    2022 · pythondocs.xyz · its alternatives →

  22. 22
  23. 23

    shell-based query tool. Contribute to muhmud/qsh development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    The interface for dit, a universal container file. - ditabase/dit-cli

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

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