For what it's worth, Twister comes out of pretty much your approach, Gardner. I worked for a long time from regexes in vi and am writing Twister to make as much of it as "batchy" as I can. For instance, when you load a regex file, you can click a button to get a count of each of the regexes in your list. I'm currently adding the ability to choose a regex and get a list of occurrences with 3 lines of context. The goal is to make it transparent how it works, and let you adjust it to make it work the way you do. But no guarantees - it's still buggy. :( You might want to wait two or three days for a newer version.) (I sure don't miss the requirement in vi to add all those backslashes you don't need in any other regex context I know of...) On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 7:39 PM, Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com>wrote: