JBot Mania

So, I had to do a Find and Replace on about 140 files (139 to be exact). I decided to scheck out Notepad++’s Find & Replace arsenal. Reason #1 - I already have a copy of it. Reason #2 - it’s free.

As suspected, it does offer you the ability to search within multiple files and to drill down through subfolders. Fantastic! So, one might suspect that you could then, oh, I don’t know, go and make replacements in all of those wonderful search results. Well, you “can” (I’m pretty sure the quotes are appropriate here) but you have to OPEN every one of those files to do it. When testing this last night, I figured “Oh, I must be missing something about how to open all of these. I’ll figure it out tomorrow when I am awake.” I was, of course, not missing anything—a nice change of pace for me.

Turns out there is no easy way to open all of those search results except by clicking on each one. Frankly, I have better things to do.

So I went and searched their forum and someone suggested doing the following, which I did and which I will share with you.

• Download AgentRansack (SACK!!)
• Do your search
• Select all of the files in that result set and do a handy little right-click and “Edit with Notepad++” (Notepad++ can actually handle this—at least it did my 139 files)
• Then do your normal Find & Replace within Notepad++ with all of your open files

You can also “Save All” and “Close All” through Notepad++, which is nice in this case.

One caveat to my situation—I was doing multiple Finds and Replaces but they were all within the same files, so I’m not sure what it would be like if I had to do this two-step process every time.

Bottom line—they both run good searches and both tools are free. Thus, you can strap on a not-so-bulky Sack (Ransack, that is) to Notepad++ and make it your search bitch.

Good luck.