SeekFast for Windows

A rather basic tool, SeekFast lets you quickly find keywords or phrases in a file. It can save you hours of combing through files looking for a quote, a passage, or a piece of code. It's probably worth the $14 charge if you have lots of files you need to search at once, but most users will do just fine with the free trial, as well.

This program's 100-file limit in the free version was rarely restrictive during testing, which is really nice. It has a layout that is almost entirely focused on giving you previews of the files, which makes finding what you're looking for even easier. Once you find something you want to examine, you can preview the text entirely in SeekFast. Like most search tools, you can organize your searches by date, relevance, and in alphabetical order. Relevance seemed to make the files that had the keyword most often appear first. You can do case-sensitive searches, too. Once you master all the ways you can alter your search, there isn't much else in the way of advanced features.

SeekFast is a great tool to save you from wading through files one by one when you're looking for something important. Since the program is so good at what it does, it's highly recommended for coders and any other users who need to search through large amounts of files or lines.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of SeekFast 1.3.