AST-Grep: Structural Code Search & Outline

Use ast-grep for syntax-aware code exploration instead of dumping large files or parsing noisy regex grep output.

High-Leverage Commands

1. Symbol Outlining

Inspect all functions, classes, interfaces, and methods in a file without loading the entire source:

ast-grep outline path/to/file.ts

2. Pattern Matching

Search for exact syntactic constructs using $VAR (single node) and $$$VAR (zero or more nodes):

# Find all function declarations
ast-grep run -p 'function $NAME($$$ARGS) { $$$BODY }' <dir>