Program’s options (Tools menus) include file type exclusion and specifying an external text editor (default is Notepad) that will open when double clicking on a search result. A ‘plugin’ section enables searching within Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) files.

AstroGrep is open source, requires Windows XP, Vista or 7 and .Net Framework v3.5 SP1.

Makagiga has a simple interface where it attempts to provide an everything at your finger tips type of experience. It comes with widgets to populate its window. The widgets include To-do, Notes, Calendar and Internet Search. Additional widgets can be downloaded (Edit—>Get More Widgets) and include the likes of a Digital Clock and Countdown timer, among others. Somewhat confusing it also supports plugins and no real distinction is made with its widgets. A separate menu (Tools—>Add or Remove Plugins) and window is used to download and use plugins such as an advanced text editor but then to get even more plugins one can click the Get More Plugins link on this same Add or Remove Plugins window. These additional plugins include such things as a chart generator, a Wolfram|Alpha query and others.

The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds comes already built-in and therefore Makagiga can be used as a news feed as well.

Makagiga requires Java and Windows XP at a minimum. Separate portable (use the run-portable.exe file) and Linux versions are available as well.

MemPad calls itself a text outliner. It is more precisely a freeware 140KB download which is a notes organizer, one which stores notes in a tree structure.

It offers basic features for fonts and colors, auto save – in minutes increments and/or automatically as text is entered – search (and replace) across all notes and the ability to export notes. It does have some more advanced features like internal linking between notes (highlight and right click to create links) and linking to system files or programs which can be used to launch anything from web links to executables from within MemPad.

With a F6 click (or Page —>Diary Page) MemPad creates a diary page for the current day and therefore it can be used as a structured diary program. It is also possible to move nodes and child nodes or pages up and down to restructure the tree. Additionally a page can be locked to provide temporary protection against accidental edits, a sort of read only format. It is also possible to encrypt a page to keep it away from prying eyes.

MemPad can do more via the Lookup.txt and Launcher.txt files found initially in its Examples folder. The chevron button on the far right of MemPad’s toolbar can be turned into a launcher by populating the Launcher.txt file with statements like Calculator;calc.exe for example – to launch the system calculator. Lookups, done via right clicking highlighted text, can be added with entries like Wikipedia;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$ for example – to look up the highlighted word in Wikipedia. Note that to use the lookups and the launcher the Lookup.txt and Launcher.txt files must be moved from the Examples folder to Mempad’s root folder.

MemPad is more powerful than its size or ‘text outliner’ description may indicate. Its help file has more, from how to modify text margins and date formats to how to more efficiently work with its launcher and lookup features.

Ultra File Search does what it’s name suggests, it can search for files and for text inside files too. It can do that not only for files residing on local drives but for files on other drives such as on a DVD or on an USB key.

Ultra File Search supports masks for filtering the search into a number of specified criteria. These criteria include not only the more common date and size masks but also less common attributes such as read only, compressed, encrypted, temporary and others including searching system or hidden files.

The ‘Containing Text’ tab can search any words, all words, as phrase and other criteria such as restricting the search to a matching case. Here it is also possible to bypass media, image, system and hidden files so as to not waste time searching for text inside them. It should be noted that Ultra File Search does support searching inside EXE and DLL file formats.

One additional and potentially time saving feature is the ‘Append Results’ one. Checking this option makes it possible to keep any displayed search results visible when additional and subsequent results are performed. Therefore various search results can be combined into one results window.

If needed parent or containing folders can be opened from within the program. Results can also be exported into various (plain, tabbed, csv, HTML and XML) text formats. Ultra File Search is available in a portable edition that can be run from flash or USB drives. Ultra File Search is freeware and runs on Windows NT 4.0 and newer versions.

CleanHaven is an utility made to clean lines, paragraphs or passages of text. In doing so it has the potential to save time and many a headache. Any text pasted into it’s window (see image) can be operated upon in several ways and a results window, after clicking the clean button, presents the finished and cleaned text to the user.

Some of its features are as follows:

Case: This includes the likes of ‘Title Case’ to capitalize words, ‘Sentence Case’ to start new sentences capitalized, convert to uppercase and convert to lower case.

Sort: This works with words or sentences as if they are individual entries in table cells. Words can be sorted in ascending, descending, case, random and other orders.

Duplicates: This removes duplicates or shows or hides duplicates.

Remove: This has a lot of options. They include removing extra spaces, extra returns, spaces, punctuation, non numbers, non letters and more.

Personal: This converts text into several formats such as separating first and last names into an indented position ready for emails, letters or documents.

Info: This does word count and others. It also does something resembling a spell check called ‘Only Correct Spellings’ and ‘Only Incorrect Spellings’. In my tests this did not work, the presence of a ‘words’ file in the program folder notwithstanding.

CleanHaven’s Replace tab does the traditional find and replace operation. The Settings tabs let you view text in tables, this helps if the input text has tabs since tabs are used to differentiate and place text into different table cells. Consequently one can choose to work on certain columns only.

Results can be exported into *.txt, *.xls and *.csv formats. CleanHaven is also available for the Mac and Linux and is a capable efficiency and productivity freeware.

neoSearch’s options include adding system folders to it’s indexing, because it ignores those folders by default, including and excluding any number of folders from it’s indexing and therefore its search results and a scheduler for future indexing which includes a ‘manual’ option.

neoSearch suffers from a few drawbacks that are all by design, they are:

The program delays its own launch, when first opened and not when already running in the background, by asking for an update check and somewhat bizarrely makes the user wait five seconds if the update check is refused.
The program’s executable is placed in the system’s Application Data folder (alongside its index database) and so the program has no presence in the Program Files folder.
Only the first six search results are presented immediately and there is no scrolling to see additional results. An extra click (pressing Enter or on the magnifying glass icon) is required to open the full search results in a new window.

neoSearch is capable of indexing shared folders over a network, supports wildcards and works on Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and 7.

Listary is a windows program that helps the user search for and find files faster but it is not a normal search tool or utility. It is activated using the (customizable) Win+W keys and its interface consists solely of a small floating box (see image). When a list of files is open pressing the program hotkey and then immediately typing a few letters of the file name one can filter down to a file name and therefore locate it. The strength of Listary is that it supports many lists or windows, these include but are not limited to Windows Explorer, Task Manager, Registry Editor, Windows Desktop and the file Open/Save dialog box. The program options (accessible via the program’s tray icon) lets the user change the search mode to what it calls traditional search. In traditional search one must type the first letter of the file name – instead of any any letter in the file name, a feature of Listary’s Default search mode – to start a search. Listary also supports the use of wild card characters (* and ?) in its traditional search mode.

Typing / in the same floating box presents the user with a set of predefined shortcut or commands. These include opening the command prompt in the same directory as the open list or window, copying folder paths and others.

Additionally Listary reserves the Win+A keys to open the system’s default text editor so that the user can have quick access to a text editor. A good use of this Listary feature is when a text area (gmail’s compose email window for example) is active or in focus then the text editor will automatically contain any text already typed so one is ready to continue editing inside the text editor.

The aforementioned text editing feature doesn’t really belong to a program geared mainly towards search but is a welcome one. A video on the program’s homepage showcases its features with a few examples. The program runs on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and has a pro version with support for regular expressions and a few other extras.

…Search for text inside any file on your computer. It can search all kinds of text files, including pdf, doc etc.

It is a simple program that does its job well and as mentioned in its description searches inside *.pdf files too. It is not limited to pure text files as it can search inside *.dll, *.exe and other such files as well. Another advantage is that the search results for *.pdf files are shown in the program’s own search results window. As of this date folder paths must be typed or pasted into the Folder box as there is no browse button available but enabling the Associate with folders setting adds a Hound entry into folders’ right click context menu. It is also possible to expand or limit a search by including subfolders and restricting file sizes.

File Hound is a useful, fast, lightweight and freeware search utility. It does require the .NET 2.0 framework on the host system.

WPF tool to help you launch your programs easily.

To start off the developer page does not mention the name ‘StartUp’. The only place this program’s name is visible is in the solitary screenshot. One can easily confuse its name to be ‘AppManager’ as that is the domain URL and also the title of page. That minor quibble aside, on to the program itself.

Upon installation StartUp looks up or indexes the system’s start menu, quick launch and recent documents entries and presents them in a rectangular interface (see image) and also groups them into areas. Right clicking anywhere on the program window or clicking the + icon one can create groups for additional shortcuts. The program supports dragging and dropping shortcuts, executables or almost any file to create links to them. It is also possible to drag a file over a program icon, while holding the Alt key, to force the file to be opened with that particular program.
The program is minimized to the system tray using its X or close icon or by just pressing the Esc key. By default the program window can be maximized by using the Alt and ~ keys or by what it calls “mouse activation”. To activate the program using the mouse single click the top left hand edge of the screen. This activation feature can be turned off using the program’s preferences.
Perhaps the best part of StartUp is the integrated search feature. Click anywhere on the program interface and just start typing, a search box narrows your choices as you type (see image).
StartUp requires, at a minimum, the .NET 3.0 framework and is a 164KB download. It is released under the Microsoft Public License.

PlainEdit.NET is a text editor for ANSI, UTF-8 and Unicode files

The list of features of PlainEdit.NET are impressive and it is a very complete text editor and notepad replacement. Its features include many of expected and common set like syntax highlighting for many languages and search and replace. But even those regular features are extended in that PlainEdit.NET suports find as you go style search ala Firefox – and only few other text editors. It has such additional features as the ability to choose text encased in HTML tags only. To bookmark a line to be able to return to it any time. To insert such things as the file path, date, special characters and the output of a command line argument. For the latter one can for example choose to output the dir (directory) command to get a list of files in a certain folder inserted into the document. PlainEdit.NET can also paste or input the current clipboard content in various positions in the open file. It can convert text to and from various formats including encoding and case conversion and even to join lines or to eliminate whitespaces and lines that match certain selectable criteria. Under the Extras menu the Configure Shortcuts submenu allows the user to edit or set keyboard shortcuts for such things as launching external applications.

PlainEdit.NET is one of the most feature rich, even beyond those mentioned in this review, and impressive text editors I have reviewed and used, it works well with ANSI, UTF-8 and Unicode files and it requires the host system to be running the 2.0 .NET framework but it is a 526KB RARed portable download. The accompanying help file however is in German only while the product site itself is available both in German and English.