When deleting a database column, I ran grep "\.html\b" across a Django codebase to check for references. It returned 1,202 hits. The column had 10 actual attribute-access references. The other 1,192 were template paths, HTML file extensions in strings, comments, and import fragments — none of which mattered.

Filtering 1,200+ grep hits by hand every time you drop a column isn't a workflow, it's a chore I kept putting off.

So I built colref — a CLI tool that uses AST parsing to find only the attribute-access references to a model field, filtering out everything grep can't.

The Haystack: One Field Name, Ten Thousand Strings

grep treats your codebase as a flat stream of characters. .html matches everything containing those five characters — in code, in strings, in comments, in template paths.

grep -rn " \.…