New search options
The following image shows a startup screen for the standalone version with the new options accented and checked. The options are available in all versions of the application.
In this example the use of the comma indicates that the search is for two phrases. Comma's indicate multiple excluding phrases ("contains either... or..."), plus signs indicate phrases to combine ("contains ... and ...") and minus signs indicates phrases to exclude ("doesn't contain ..."). These operators can be combined.
In the case of a regular expression search you can only enter one search phrase, so these options are ignored and instead interpreted as part of the expression. The syntax to be used is the variant that is used by Python.
When the options to specify individual directories and files not to search are checked the following screens subsequently pop up. According to settings such as "include subdirectories", the directories that are to be searched are determined and displayed in the first one.
Selected directories are discarded and according the setting "search files of this type" the files to be searched are determined and shown in the second one.
To speed up the selection process, I've made it possible in these two dialogs to select or unselect all items and to invert the selection.
Here is the result screen showing search results in Python files with the context i.e. the class and function definitions containing the found lines. Note the extra column in between the other two:
Also note the extra checkbox ("comma delimited") and the extra button "repeat search" that makes it possible to repeat the search without leaving the results screen, for instance to see what happens after you've changed some files that are shown. By the way, these buttons are always available regardless whether "show context" was selected.
If you doubleclick on a specific piece of text on the screen, you can have a text editor open the file indicated at the selected line (pressing Ctrl-G after selecting the text also works). It defaults to my favourite editor SciTE, but this is configurable.
F1 on the results screen pops up a reminder of this function.
Search options and most-recently used search strings are stored on a per-directory basis in a central location (under .afrift in the user home directory). Also stored there are options for a fallback encoding (in case UTF-8 doesn't work) and the text editor to open. These options are initialized the first time the program is used.