TextCrawler

4.0 stars

"When opening many files fails..."

March 4, 2012  |   By ScottMSanders

Version: TextCrawler 2.2

Pros

It easily and quickly finds and replaces text in tons of files, unlike opening them all at once in a multi-file text editor.

Cons

None so far!

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5.0 stars

"Still the awesomeness of Text Crawler, just updated."

November 22, 2011  |   By jandsm5321

Version: TextCrawler 2.2

Pros

Lots of features, fast.

Cons

Doesn't do my laundry.

Summary

If you need to search through files a lot learning to use this program will save you lots of time! I use it to search XML files for modding games.

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5.0 stars

"Just what I need"

October 31, 2011  |   By bcoulam

Version: TextCrawler 2.2

Pros

See my 2.0 review. Has every feature I was looking for, and was faster than all the other freeware (and most commercial) search tools with regexp.

Cons

None, sorry to be a drag.

Summary

With the addition of the right-click menu option to copy the found file's name and path to the clipboard, this fast little free search tool has everything I need in a file/directory scanner.

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5.0 stars

"Excellent stuff"

June 21, 2011  |   By James Rice

Version: TextCrawler 2.1

Pros

Does what it claims - and well

Cons

Not quite as featureful as I'd like for regex handling and multiple replacements.

Summary

All 'round I think that this is a jolly good piece of software. Everything it claims to do it does with aplomb. It's a little hard to be critical of shareware like this that's as good as this, especially if the only problems I have with it are features that I'd like that it doesn't claim to have, and perhaps nobody else would like anyway.

Still, in case the author is reading (well done, incidentally), and in case there are other people like me, here are my feature requests:

1) When doing regexp-based replacements, it'd be very useful to be able to tell it to pluck out bindings using the regexp and arrange them as desired in a replacement. It's great that one can *find* text using a regexp, but one can't use the power of the pattern match to be able to compute a replacement on-the-fly. For example, let's consider the case of wanting to replace all instances of US-type date syntax with the British style. That is, for the fifteenth of March of 2011 an American would write (say) 03/15/2011, but an Englishman would write 15/03/2011. One can detect such instances easily enough with (say - yes I know you could be more precise) \d\d/\d\d/\d\d\d\d, or grouped as: (\d\d)/(\d\d)/(\d\d\d\d). However, there's no way (that I've found) to swap over the parts in the replacement. I'd like to be able to specify the replacement string such that it can pick up the bindings from the search pattern. So, I'd like to be able to specify the replacement string as (say) ${1}/${0}/${2}. This would be a hugely valuable feature for me. This is a generalisation of a nice feature that one found in the "edi" line editor under RSX many moons ago. One used to be able to say s/foo...bar/bob...sally to replace any string beginning with "foo" and ending with "bar" for one beginning with "bob" and ending with "sally". The "..." got bound to the intervening text and propagated appropriately. Of course, it was less powerful in that one couldn't reorder the bindings.

2) It'd be nice to be able to perform multiple edits all in one fell swoop. Sometimes when doing complex edits it's necessary to perform multiple coordinated edits. For example, if you want to swap all occurences for the string "Bob" with the string "Sally" then you generally have to rename all "Bob" occurrences into some intermediate (say) "@@@@Bill@@@@", substitute all "Sally" strings into "Bob" and then all "@@@@Bill@@@@" strings into "Sally". Sometimes there are more complex cases, but I'm sure you get the picture. It'd be nice to be able to set this up as a single bulk edit. I've only ever seen this sort of thing in an interactive editor in an obscure editor on the Ferranti Argus 700 machine, but it was *really* useful.

3) One particular case of the sort of multiple edit discussed above is found when renaming things in languages like Java. If I have a class called (say) BigDog, then I will typically also have variables called (say) bigDog, methods called getBigDog, and perhaps constants called BIG_DOG. One also finds that there will be a file called BigDog.java which will need to be renamed. It's be great to have specialised support for this sort of thing.

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5.0 stars

"Outstanding free regex search engine"

June 13, 2011  |   By jlawshe

Version: TextCrawler 2.1

Pros

Standard and regex/grep search
Robust (does not crash with search/replace on 10k+ html files)
Searches across multiple lines
Regex tester
Exports search results
Standard and regex searches
Thorough documentation

Cons

No cons found

Summary

This is by far the best regex/grep engine I've found so far: it's amazing that it's free/donation based. It's a fantastic way to perform bulk search-and-replace operations on lots of files (tested on over 14,000 HTML files in one batch). Even venerable commercial products like Dreamweaver froze up on my system with the same job, but TextCrawler kept working. It's clear that a lot of thought and user testing went into features like, the scratchpad, expression tester, and results export. Outstanding product.

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4.0 stars

"Great text manipulator with very easy interface"

April 26, 2011  |   By lawton20

Version: TextCrawler 2.1

Pros

,Will work with multiple files, Very flexible in replace style

Cons

Lacks cyclic replace from an input text file. If it had that it would be the only replace tool I'd use

Summary

Good for all text replacements except where you want input text to come from an external file.

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5.0 stars

"Really great for $0"

April 6, 2011  |   By bcoulam

Version: TextCrawler 2.1

Pros

Blindingly fast.
Regular expressions.
Subfolders
Case and match whole word.
Search and Replace too.

Cons

Could use a copy/file & path name from the results pane (developer is adding this soon).

Summary

Tested nine other freeware and shareware tools that do Find in Files and Search and Replace in Files. UltraEdit's was the strongest and most feature-rich. TextCrawler came in second in speed and features, followed by Agent Ransack.

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5.0 stars

"Efficient tool for quick changes to multiple files."

February 19, 2011  |   By difra-2009

Version: TextCrawler 2.1

Pros

All changes are reviewed in highlighted type. Very fast!

Cons

None that I can find...

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5.0 stars

"Awesome Product"

February 1, 2011  |   By jigarme

Version: TextCrawler 2.0

Pros

It is fast!

Cons

...............

Summary

Cant live without it on my development box.

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