Tag: find

Ultra File Search: Free And Lightweight

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.

August 31, 2010
Freeware CleanHaven Dusts Off Your Text

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.

August 29, 2010
Caderno Is Notepad Plus More

Caderno is described by its author as

Caderno is a remake of the common program “notepad”

Another point the author likes to emphasis is that Caderno attempts to re-create a Firefox like experience. One important feature of Caderno that makes the aforementioned statement true, and the program very much Firefox-like, is that it comes with a ‘find as you type’ feature to search .txt or other files. It also features tabs for opening multiple documents. A session management console allows a user to work with a set number of documents and be able to reload them together. The revert feature – found under the file menu – can reload the last saved version of an open document. Caderno also supports PHP code completion, syntax highlighting for a growing number of languages and an improving though yet not full support for utf documents. A portable version is also in the works and should arrive after the author makes decisions on how to handle the program’s built-in crash recovery when working with a USB thumb drive.
Caderno is a relatively young project and a very interesting one, it should run on all more recent versions of Windows.

August 16, 2009
TextCrawler Finds and Replaces Text

TextCrawler is described by its author as

…TextCrawler enables you to instantly find and replace words and phrases across multiple files and folders..

TextCrawler is simple yet powerful. The first step in using it is choosing a filter for file extensions that are being searched, either from the choices presented or by typing one’s own. The second step is browse to the folder where the files are located. Note that the program’s options has a setting to scan or search subfolders as well. The next step is to type the text to find and the text to replace. TextCrawler supports regular expressions and the star icon beside the Find text area provides some examples for finding such things as dates or IP addresses. The program’s own help files explains regular expressions a bit further. An interesting feature is the ability to find the text being searched for first and then do the replacing after by clicking a separate button, this allows the user to preview all the instances of the found text before moving on. Also the Extract feature allows the user to copy all instances of the found text, this is useful for collecting information based on the search results.
The program also includes a Batch Commands tool to work with find and replace text pairs. Additionally the regular expression tester, which like the Batch Commands tool is located under the Tools menu, reduces the chances of making a mistake. TextCrawler runs under Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista.

August 9, 2009