Can grep show matching part of line with "context"? [duplicate]

Question

Say I have this text-file (lorem.txt):

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua.

If I use grep I can now easily find the row containing eiusmod by:

$ grep eiusmod lorem.txt
adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor

By using some sort of context-switch like -C I can even get the lines surrounding the match:

$ grep -C1 eiusmod lorem.txt
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna

This is good. But what if I just want to see some of the characters closest to the match on the same line? Not the full line. So a behaviour like this:

$ grep --char-context=3 eiusmod lorem.txt
do eiusmod te
$ grep -n --char-context=5 dol lorem.txt
1:psum dolor si
3:e et dolore m

I could of course do this with some clever sed, awk or other tool:

$ sed -n '/dol/{=;s/.*\(...dol...\).*/\1/p}' lorem.txt | sed 'N;s/\n/:o/'
1:um dolor 
3:et dolore

But that is not what I want. It's too complicated and obscure to be usable on a day-to-day basis. So is there a simpler way or tool to achieve this?

This is mainly a problem when doing recursive grep over files with long lines like minified css or other files with long texts without newlines. I first started thinking about this when using git grep so a solution usable both for plain grep and git grep is preferred.

Note also that a grep-pipe-sed construct is undesirable since that will remove any highlight/colorisation of the match.

Answer 1

grep -noE '.{,4}dolor.{,4}' lorem.txt

It returns:

1:sum dolor sit
3: et dolore ma

Answer 2

Solution based on Wiktor Stribiżew comment above.

Possible to create 'grep-cxt', which will take 2 mandatory parameters (# of characters around pattern, pattern) and optional list of files (default: stdin).

#! /bin/bash
count=$1
pattern=$2
shift
shift
grep -E --all-match ".{0,$count}$pattern.{0,$count}" "$@"