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I was forced to use Visual Studio and wave off my favourite Notepad++. Now after coming back to Notepad++ I can see how slow it searches for fiels, where Visual Studio had "Solutions" where files could be "Included" and indexed which lowered search time among HTML, XML, CSS, JS files few times.

I want that speed in any system - how to search files for Regex and strings fast?

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  • Use an SSD or SSD cache. Dec 19, 2013 at 17:30
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    I do use SSD, so? Dec 19, 2013 at 19:21
  • Then simplify your query. Add filetype restrictions so that it's only searching your source files. Dec 19, 2013 at 20:46
  • Visual Studio runs thru files with no special restrictions. Dec 20, 2013 at 11:35
  • I'm not sure what you're asking then. Visual studio searches quickly by limiting the number of files that it has to search. The only way you'll do the same elsewhere is by also limiting the number of files you have to search Dec 20, 2013 at 19:18

1 Answer 1

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Try a dedicated text search tool like FileLocator Lite or WinGrep to search. They both support regular expressions and should be faster than Notepad++. Just remember to restrict the search to only valid source files in your project, e.g.

*.js;*.css;*.xml;*.htm?
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  • For sake of speed I could even craete search index and use for ex. lucene.apache.org/core, how proposed programs are better? Dec 23, 2013 at 13:21
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    Sure you could do, it depends how big your source code base is. The main problem with index based searching is if the index isn't being updated quick enough to find recent changes. How many files are you searching through?
    – snowdude
    Dec 23, 2013 at 16:33
  • 5MB of 10k text files in different extentions like js; css; php; Dec 24, 2013 at 12:09
  • You shouldn't need indexed search for 5MB of text files. Windows will be able to keep all that in cache and a text search with something like FileLocator Lite should be sub-second (after the first search).
    – snowdude
    Dec 30, 2013 at 13:21

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