I am so fed up with it and I can't even count the number of times I've almost physically destroyed my computer while trying to use it with simple search queries. - no ability to search in php files, not to mention no effective/reliable way to search in cpp and h files - no ability to effectively search a single or multiple strings in file names (I have about 1500 files in a folder and I know one or more of the files contains the search strings in its name and yet search can't find it) - horrendous shell integration (needs to be manually enabled for folders and even that won't enable it for drives) I don't care about indexing and I don't care about simplyicity of use - I want realiable results. Is there a decent free alternative out there? This shouldn't be too hard to make but I seriously wouldn't want to go re-inventing the wheel if there's a solution already out there.

I can't necessarily speak for the "good" part of this, but Google Desktop provides a search feature. I hear that you're looking for a search tool and Google comes to mind as someone with the best technology when it comes to that. On their features page they show an example of searching for a substring within a file name like you were describing so it seems like it would get the job done.

I've never used it (which is why I can't speak for the "good" part) because I figure Google has enough information about how I operate my life without being privy to what I do locally on my computer as well. :)

Before Vista, I used Google Desktop Search and liked it pretty well. you can get plugins for it that will let you index arbitrary file types like PHP. But honestly, since Vista, I haven't had a need for it.

It's not a system utility, but when I want to search my code files for text, I use Textpad v4.1.

Hmm - the last time I used Google Desktop was a long long time ago and it seemed like an oversimplified piece of garbage that relied on indexing and didn't provide nearly enough simplicity paired with flexibility for my taste (eg it was too simple and didn't give enough control). Perhaps I was misusing it or perhaps it's been improved since, but why the hell would I have to acquire plugins for it to work on simple text-based file formats?

The main thing I want to stress is that I hate indexing - I really do. It's pointless and useful in very marginal cases, such as when searching through a static (a non-changing) directory that contains raw text files. I hate anything that is grinding my hard drive when I do not tell my computer to and indexing is the last thing I want to see doing that. Besides, I can wait for 30 seconds or a minute for the search to finish because without indexing I know it's 100% reliable. And yes, I've heard of multitasking, so the wait time is largely irrelevant.

Seriously - a primitive reliable search (that does not care about file types or nature) is the simplest thing to implement, yet is there nothing out there that provides that most straightforward functionality without any hoops or simplifications. To compare - Vista's search function is like a tour de force with the aim to oppose this notion as strognly as possible - its sole aim being to screw the user over and provide the worst possible (or, for me, in most cases no) search results.

I'll look into Textpad, though!

Quote: Original post by irreversible
- no ability to search in php files, not to mention no effective/reliable way to search in cpp and h files

In regedit, go to HKCR\.php and add a ContentType string set to text/plain and a PerceivedType string set to text. That will allow the indexer to index PHP files. However, you don't seem to like the indexer, which brings me onto:

Quote: Is there a decent free alternative out there? This shouldn't be too hard to make but I seriously wouldn't want to go re-inventing the wheel if there's a solution already out there.

PowerShell (should be installed automatically, you may need to enable it as a component) works, if you don't mind command-line tools:

Get-ChildItem -Filter *.php -Recurse | Select-String 'mysql'

mysql is a regular expression there, so use mysql|dir to find instances of either of those keywords (for example).

The last time Windows had a working "find text in files" thing built in was in Windows 95, and even then it barely worked. [rolleyes]

add php to the known indexable types, and then reconfigure the index to only contain your folders. that means, changing it from c:\users\yourname\ to, specifically, manually c:\users\yourname\pictures .. documents .. videos

why? so it doesn't go trough the appdata stuff you have. that reduces the amount of data it has to index massively, and thus improving it's search performance, and it's uptodate-ness massively.

in win7, search is much improved btw. maybe it's something to consider?

baregrep is a nice gui based text searching tool - www.baremetalsoft.com

Thanks! Baregrep looks massively more potent than Vista's Search!