For what it's worth, Twister comes out of pretty much yourapproach, 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...)