INDEX-BASED TEXT RETRIEVAL
An index-based text retrieval program indexes all the words in folders and files you designate.
You can index your entire hard drive, a single folder, a project,
or a single file. Although you can index a single file, you
will typically index many files. With an alphabetized index, a
text retrieval program
provides the following two advantages:
- You can find words or names in files
instantly. The program does not search
through files for your target word. It searches the index
itself. And since the index is ordered, that is, alphabetized, a
search can be done on a million words in under a second.
- You can keep an overview of your
writings and materials. For example, suppose you have
thirty chapters in thirty respective files, along with a few files of
notes and research, and a character named John Doe appears in many of
the files. Use the index to find every reference to John Doe in
your files. Did you forget which chapter has John Doe finding the
knife he used on the sacrificial yak? No problem. Look in
your index. Click on the word "knife." Then click on one of
the files shown to contain "knife" and you can look at the file in
either the built-in editor or your selected word processor.
Finders KeepersTM gives
you index-based text retrieval for under $30. This is for writers, not gigantic departments with mainframe-sized
information technology. So, Finders Keepers is friendly to the non-technical, or the technically tired.
FIND INDEXED WORDS 4 WAYS
You can search 4 ways through
the index: plain text, regular expression, approximate, and
sound-alike. The regular expression method provides a
grep-like search of the index. If you are not familiar with
"regular expression" and "grep," don't worry--just use the other
methods. The approximate and sound-alike searches enable you to
search the index even when you do not know how to spell a word,
or it has been misspelled in the indexed files. You can
view or
edit found files 6 different ways.
FIND STUFF WITHOUT INDEXING
Finders KeepersTM does not have to use the
index in order to search. It can directly search any files, folders,
or drives that you designate. And it still provides 4 ways to search
the files and 6 ways to view them. When you search files directly instead of
searching a pre-made index, you can save the listed results to a file on disk,
along with the word or expression you searched for, the files and
folders you searched, and so on.
OTHER GOODIES
A text editor is built in, as is a binary-file
viewer. The text editor can handle ASCII files. The
binary-file viewer can look at any file--but to be safe, it can not edit a
thing. The program can replace text in multiple files and keep backup copies of all changed files.
FOR ADVANCED USERS
Finders KeepersTM has many features to
suit the advanced user, including regular expressions, scores of options,
batch mode, built-in binary and text viewers, zip file
options, and binary-character expressions. Found files can be selected for moving, copying, or
deleting. You can choose file extensions to exclude from searches
always. Other exclusions are accomplished by filters for
file characteristics, such as date and size. Replace text in multiple
files using regular expressions. Or disable
replace operations if you have kids or novices using your
computer. Save different sets of options to disk for
later reloading.
Let Finders Keepers do
the search--you do the thinking!TM
|