foam grep

Search note content by pattern.

foam grep <pattern> [options]

Searches the text content of all notes in the workspace. The pattern is matched case-insensitively as a regular expression. Unlike foam search, this command searches the full text of each note rather than indexed metadata.

Options

Option	Description
--context <n>	Show n lines of surrounding context around each match
--no-line-number	Omit line numbers from output
--limit <n>	Max number of matching files to return (default: 20)
--workspace <dir>	Workspace root (default: FOAM_WORKSPACE env var, then current directory)
--format <fmt>	Output format: text (default) or json

Examples

Search for a word across all notes:

foam grep "quantum"
# physics/quantum-mechanics.md:3: Quantum mechanics describes...
# research/reading-list.md:12: See also quantum entanglement

Search with context lines:

foam grep "TODO" --context 2

Limit results:

foam grep "meeting" --limit 5

Use in a script (JSON output):

foam grep "action item" --format json

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Foam CLI