

PowerGREP is described as 'Powerful Windows grep tool. Quickly search through large numbers of files on your PC or network, including text and binary files, compressed archives, MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, OpenOffice files, etc' and is a File Search utility in the file management category. There are more than 50 alternatives to PowerGREP for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and iPad apps. The best PowerGREP alternative is FSearch, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like PowerGREP are DocFetcher, Agent Ransack, Clapgrep and Cardinal File Search.


Find Any File searches your local disks for files by name, creation or modification date, size, or type and creator code (not by content, though). As there are other tools with a similar search operation, here are the special features unique to Find Any File:




Performs high-speed file searches using a proprietary engine across built-in, portable, and network drives, including hidden and non-indexed files, supports detailed result filtering, provides file comparison, hex editing, autosave, advanced sorting, and multitasking.




Local-first desktop app for Mac offering plain English search across file names, metadata, and document contents. Uses semantic ranking, previews, live indexing, and keeps all processing local for privacy. Optional API-based semantic search can be enabled.




Silver Searcher is a code search tool similar to ack that claims to be much faster. It's implemented in C and has some extra features such as ignoring files per .hignore, .gitignore contents.
File search utility that provides instant search by file name, and powerful search by file contents, size and date. Supports search inside PDF, Microsoft Office and other documents. Highlights found text in file names and contents. Clean and intuitive multi-tabbed user interface.


Search files with smart queries as with Google, replace simple or multiline text in multiple files. The batch replace operation easily updates hundreds of different links in several files. Extremely fast, easy to use, with excellent help.




VX Search is an automated, rule-based file search solution allowing one to search files by the file type, category, file name, size, location, extension, regular expressions, text and binary patterns, creation, modification and last access dates, EXIF tags, etc.



Recursively search source code and text files for a pattern, then open matched files in your favourite editing/viewing app.



A free file finding and text searching tool:



regexxer is a nifty GUI search/replace tool featuring Perl-style regular expressions. If you need project-wide substitution and you’re tired of hacking sed command lines together, then you should definitely give it a try.
