Alternatives for “Find in Files”

Question

I've fallen foul of the "find-in-files-isn't" issue as suggested here and reported on Connect, but it seems that the issue will not be fixed until "the next major release" of VS.

While I could live with the issue and work-around of "clean source tree, restart VS", I still can't trust that it is not giving me false negatives.

Some form of "Find in files" is critical to aggressive refactoring across a source tree, so I'm looking for an alternative. Ideally a pluging to VS, but I'd settle for a good external app that could support regex and file type filters

I don't trust Windows Search (for similar false negative reasons).

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I use Resharper with Visual Studio 2008, and this lets me search through classes (with Ctrl + T) or find find through files (Ctrl + Shift + T)

Visual Studio 2010 has this search functionality built in if I can remember it correctly.

Answer 2

Tools I use and like:

I have found grepwin to be a good tool to find and also replace things in text files.

It is easy to install, easy to use, and it can replace... it can show the contents of the file, the line that it found the text, and has support to regular expressions. Lots of things to play with, in a single interface.

It covers all your requirements, but this: 'Ideally a pluging to VS'... but it can be integrated manually, like described bellow.

Supports: 'aggressive refactoring' =), 'regex' and 'file type filters'.

• Home page or http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/grepWin.html

• Download page

• Integrating manually:Integrating grepWin into Visual Studio

I like it and used it for some time now.

Other tools:

If you don't like it take a look here:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/searchandreplace.shtml

lots of external tools exists... you could eventually make a VS Macro to open the external application, and give it some parameters. But this is just an option... I would not follow this option, because it is too complex for the matter.