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Wosp

advanced full-text search on the command line

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Hi, I'm Andrew Trettel. I'm a scientist and researcher. I wrote Wosp to help me search local documents using Boolean and proximity operators.Wosp is a command-line program that performs full-text search on text documents. Wosp stands for word-oriented search and print. It is designed for advanced searchers. It works differently than line-oriented search tools like grep, so it can search for matches spanning multiple lines. Wosp supports an expressive query language that contains both Boolean and proximity operators. It also supports nested queries, truncation, wildcard characters, and fuzzy searching.The linked GitHub repository contains all of the code to try out the program. I also wrote a blog post (https://www.andrewtrettel.com/blog/wosp/) that discusses my motivations for creating Wosp in more detail, along with some additional technical discussion and diagrams.If you give Wosp a try, I'd appreciate any comments or feedback you have about the experience.

HN · launched Nov 5, 2025 · 8 upvotes (top 56%) · 0 views

Niche: command line productivity tools · 82 launches, 0 in the last 7 days ▼ -100% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Search & retrieval
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

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More like this: all 82 launches in command line productivity tools →

Could you build this?

Partial A basic CLI search tool is straightforward, but implementing performant full-text search with complex Boolean parsing, positional index tokens, and proximity distance matching is mathematically and algorithmically tricky.

What it would actually take: Building a robust CLI search tool requires a custom query parser (supporting ASTs for AND, OR, NOT, NEAR/n), an efficient inverted index with token positions, and optimized disk or memory-mapped file access. Implementing accurate word-distance proximity operators and ranking requires solid algorithmic knowledge of information retrieval and systems programming in C, Rust, or Go.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: USPTO query language, BRS/Search, Contextual Query Language

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 42 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #23 of 43 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 7 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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