Colgrep

colgrep Plugin

Semantic code search for your terminal. Combines regex filtering with semantic ranking. All local — your code never leaves your machine. A single Rust binary with ONNX Runtime baked in.

Commands

Indexing

• colgrep index init — Build the search index for a project
• colgrep index clear — Clear the search index

Search

• colgrep search query — Semantic code search with optional regex filtering

Model Management

• colgrep model set — Persist a ColBERT-style model as the default
• colgrep model status — Show which model an index was built with

Utility

• colgrep self version — Print colgrep version
• colgrep _ _ — Passthrough to colgrep CLI

Usage Examples

• "Search for database connection pooling code in this project"
• "Find error handling patterns in the codebase"
• "Build a search index for the current project"
• "Index a specific project at /path/to/code"
• "Search using a regex for async functions first"

Installation

brew install lightonai/tap/colgrep

Examples

# Build the index for the current project
colgrep index init

# Build the index for a specific project
colgrep index init /path/to/project

# Semantic search
colgrep search query "database connection pooling"

# Regex + semantic search
colgrep search query -e "async.*await" "error handling"

# One-shot model override
colgrep search query --model lightonai/LateOn-Code "recursive tree traversal"

# Persist a model as default
colgrep model set lightonai/LateOn-Code

# Check which model the index was built with
colgrep model status

# Clear the index for the active model
colgrep index clear

# Wipe every index across all models
colgrep index clear --all

Key Features

• Semantic ranking using ColBERT-style multi-vector embeddings
• Regex pre-filtering combined with semantic search
• All local — code never leaves your machine
• Incremental updates — detects file changes automatically
• Single binary with ONNX Runtime baked in (no external dependencies)
• Grep-compatible flags
• SQLite metadata pre-filtering
• CPU-optimized (CUDA supported when available)

Default Model

The default model is lightonai/LateOn-Code-edge. You can switch to any other ColBERT-style model on HuggingFace:

colgrep model set lightonai/LateOn-Code

Each (project, model) pair has its own index directory, so switching models never corrupts existing indexes.

Agent Integrations

ColGREP can integrate with AI coding agents:

colgrep _ _ --install-claude-code
colgrep _ _ --install-opencode
colgrep _ _ --install-codex

Notes

• Run colgrep index init before your first search in a project
• After indexing, every search detects file changes and updates the index automatically
• No server, no API, no external inference server needed
• Works on CPU; GPU acceleration available when CUDA is present