The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Dear All,

I'm looking for a portable freeware that can search in a lot of text files and has the following features.

• Search in huge text files very fast. It is okay if it takes a little time to generate an index, in the beginning.
• Supports UTF-8 encoding for search words and text files.
• Supports either wildcard (*, ?) or regular expressions matching.
• Can match multiple search words at once, regardless of their position or occurrences in each file.
  e.g. if I look for the two words "rainforest" and "coconut" it should return only those files that contain both words.
• Advanced search criteria would be an advantage but is not a must have.
  e.g. if I want to combine the above logic then search for files containing both "rainforest" and "coconut" but not containing "chocolate".
• Can search for mispelled words.
  e.g. if I look for "chocolate" it should find "chocloate" as well.
• Has a pretty good text viewer built-in (or has an option to launch an external viewer for each found file with the ease of a click or a keyboard shortcut).

Any help is appreciated.

I'm guessing DocFetcher is the only one that comes close https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2660 as it does create an Index. Most other search programs either search files not using an index, or are not portable or not freeware.

Alternative would be to use a "fast" command line tool, something like Silver Searcher @ https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher, if you write the results to a text file you can open that in your editor and from there you should be able to open files pretty quickly.

DocFetcher uses a number of advanced search functions (I posted about that a few months back) that will do what you describe and more. I highly recommend it.

The included text viewer isn't excellent, but it's more than adequate and will launch whatever program associated to the file type e.g. NotePad++ for .TXT files.

Thanks for the ideas.

Well, unfortunately DocFetcher is not really what I'm looking for. Let alone it's written in Java which I try to avoid. I prefer lightweight apps like Everything.

lintalist wrote: ↑Sat Jan 05, 2019 6:24 am as it does create an Index

It doesn't really have to create an index. If it searches without creating an index, it's still good.

Anything else?

palacs wrote: ↑Fri Jan 04, 2019 7:21 amI'm looking for a portable freeware that can search in a lot of text files and has the following features.

• Can search for mispelled words.
  e.g. if I look for "chocolate" it should find "chocloate" as well.

I can't think of any search program like this. As far as I can recall not even Spotlight on macOS has such functionality. Have you seen this in a program, outside of online search engines?

I would also give up on misspelled words.

palacs wrote: ↑Sun Jan 20, 2019 4:45 am I would also give up on misspelled words.

A quick search pulls up Grepy2, which looks promising and even has some Everything integration, coincidentally. Not sure if portable but looks to be worth checking.

I suspect that Specular's suggestion will prove most useful as a grep based program probably has more bells and whistles. I have used PowerGrep in the past (not portable or freeware).
For my own needs in this area I have found LookDisk useful. Its strength for me is that it can search within Zips and PDFs. It's in the TPFC database.

Did a bit more poking around and came across AstroGrep, which offers a similar range of features as Grepy2 (minus the Everything integration, for one) but known to be portable (tested myself). Smaragdus happened to have also posted about it here previously which offers a good overview.

The current portable version can be downloaded here.