Line searches

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Posted by Francis Morrone
Nov 18, 2006 at 05:59 AM

After looooong experience with information managers, I find that one of the features that matters most to me is what I think we call “line searches,” i.e., search queries that show every line in which a search term appears. For example, suppose I am searching in a tree-based outliner for “Balzac.” Some of my “articles” may be just a few words, some may be a thousand words or more. When I search for “Balzac,” I don’t want to know just which articles contain that term, I want to know which *lines* contain that term. At the very least, I want the search results pane to tell me how many times the term appears in a given article, and then provide an easy way to drill down. And I want this search to be global—across at least all open files. So far, I have found that among “PIMs,” only the obsolete KeyNote and the word-processing suite Nota Bene provide this functionality. My text editor, UltraEdit (which IMHO is the gold standard of Windows text editors) provides this functionality, but I’d like to see it in a rich-text environment, with all the other outlining/PIM-like functionality. I hope I am making myself clear, but this seems to me as though it ought to be one of the most basic functions of an organizer. Am I missing any programs out there?

Posted by Kenneth Rhee
Nov 18, 2006 at 08:40 AM

Francis Morrone wrote:
>After looooong experience with information managers, I find that one of the features
>that matters most to me is what I think we call “line searches,” i.e., search queries
>that show every line in which a search term appears. For example, suppose I am
>searching in a tree-based outliner for “Balzac.” Some of my “articles” may be just a
>few words, some may be a thousand words or more. When I search for “Balzac,” I don’t want
>to know just which articles contain that term, I want to know which *lines* contain
>that term. At the very least, I want the search results pane to tell me how many times the
>term appears in a given article, and then provide an easy way to drill down. And I want
>this search to be global—across at least all open files. So far, I have found that
>among “PIMs,” only the obsolete KeyNote and the word-processing suite Nota Bene
>provide this functionality. My text editor, UltraEdit (which IMHO is the gold
>standard of Windows text editors) provides this functionality, but I’d like to see it
>in a rich-text environment, with all the other outlining/PIM-like functionality. I
>hope I am making myself clear, but this seems to me as though it ought to be one of the most
>basic functions of an organizer. Am I missing any programs out there?

Only other program offers this functionality is Asksam Pro.

It shows # of hits within the documents as well as total # of documents the word is found as well as context column. If you click one of the search results, it takes you to the document and the searched word is highlighted. You can also search across multiple files (you can assign which files) and those files do not have to be opened. It’s also indexed; so, the search is lightning fast.

I would suggest you try out for yourself to see if it meets your need.

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 18, 2006 at 01:20 PM

Francis, MDE InfoHandler has this ability you seek.

InfoHandler pulls up the whole document, and then finds and highlights each instance that matches the search. To me this is an improvement on the line by line approach because you have much greater context surrounding the found search term.

Daly

Posted by Cassius
Nov 19, 2006 at 06:25 AM

There is a (non-indexing) search tool that I believe does what you wish. File Locater Pro at http://www.mythicsoft.com will display lines containing hits and, if asked, will show more of the text, IF the file is readable by the FIP.

Unfortunately, many PIMs today compress their files and so may be unsearchable by FLP.

-c

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