PHiSearch

Performing a simple file search with Windows default tools is pretty convenient and easy, but finding content inside files can become a pain. This operation is useful when trying to identify a piece of code in source files, and is the kind of task PHiSearch lets you perform, in an intuitive environment, and with various related settings.

The application’s visual design is pretty neat, letting you accommodate in a jiffy. Most of the space is dedicated to browsing through results, with query and location fields in an upper toolbar. What’s makes things even better is the tab support, letting you search for multiple items at a time, even though it generally doesn’t take more than a few seconds.

Depending on the type of files you want to search in, you might want to pay a visit to the settings panel in order to manage extensions. Split into two columns, you get to decide which to look through, and which to ignore. Some practical coding file types are already on the list of targets. There’s the possibility to specify default editor to open files in.

For the search to be efficient, or to even work at all, you need to specify the target location, but this needs to be done by pasting in the path, because of the lack of a browse dialog. Other related fields let you specify text to find, whether to include specific masks, or exclude some. Moreover, you can choose to include subfolders, look for an entire word, match casing, or use regular expressions.

It takes only a few seconds for the application to do its job, with time taken, files searched, and matches found shown in the status bar. One of the two panels shows all identified files with details like name, location, type, and number of occurrences in content. You can expand a file to view lines where text is identified, and perform some basic operations like opening in the default viewer, bringing up the location, and a few more.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that PHiSearch is a practical application that can identify text inside documents for you in the blink of an eye. It’s especially handy for developers that want to identify particular lines of code or functions, while tab support lets you perform multiple operations without discarding previous results.