FullTextSearch

A tool for searching through the text of large amounts of files

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• Overview

  • FullTextSearch can be used to find specific files that have certain lines of text in them
  • It is useful when you are working on large projects
    • You might know something you need to change
    • You might not know where it is
  • You can use both normal text, or regular expressions to find what you are looking for
  • It might not be very useful if you don't have very many files to search through

• Example usage

  • You find a bug in a project where a message is misspelled
    • Browse for the project's base folder
    • Fill in the file type (i.e. *.cs)
    • Type in the misspelling in the search text
    • The tool will do the rest
    • You can make basic edits to the file in the tool itself, or have it open the file in the default program for it's file type

• Getting Started

  • The program is now installed with a ClickOnce installer.
    • Just download the latest release, unzip the files, and open either FullTextSearch.application or setup.exe
    • The program will automatically install and should run after installation is complete
    • A desktop shortcut will be created automatically for the tool

• Detailed Usage

  • The main goal of this project is to allow intelligent searching of text using multiline regular expressions
    • This can allow you to find very specific pieces of information in a vast amount of files
    • It can take quite a while to find all of the files with very complicated expressions though
  • The file extensions must fit the criteria for the function System.IO.Directory.GetFiles(String, String, SearchOption)
    • This function is documented here
  • The regular expressions accepted are from on the .NET framework's regular expressions
    • There is documentation for them here

• Developer info

  • The tool uses the MVVM model using C#
  • There is an MSTest project for the primary search function, though I'd like to get tests setup for everything other than the Views
  • If you would like to contribute to this project, pull requests are accepted

• License

  • FullTextSearch uses the GNU GPLv3 license. You can get a copy of the license here