Putting a Spotlight on EasyFind

On 24th November I was grumbling because Spotlight wasn't going to do what I wanted it to. The problem is that I want to search for text in multiple .php files, and while Spotlight can apparently be made to do it (it doesn't index .php files by default), you can't guarantee that it will find all occurrences of what you are looking for because it might not have indexed the files yet.

I concluded that I needed something else and I found it in the shape of EasyFind from DEVONtechnologies.

It's freeware and you can get it to search for file and/or folder names and/or contents for words, phrases etc. You can't search meta-data like you can with Spotlight, but who cares. The big advantage is that it does the search when you ask so you can rely on it to find everything.

A really nice feature is that you can tell EasyFind what file types to search in not one, but five lists, each of which has a checkbox next to it. The reason that I like this so much is that I usually want to search .php files but sometimes I also want to include any .html and .shtml files that may be in the project folder (and sub folders). There are also times when I want to include .css and .tpl (template files). By grouping the files onto the five different lists I can easily control which files EasyFind is going to search when I set it in motion.

It manages to search my larger projects with two or three hundred files in a matter of seconds and displays the results as a list of file names along with date last nodified, files size, and location, sorted into whatever order I choose. All I have to do then is to drag and drop the ones I want into Smultron and I'm off.