Simple Text Search Tool

STST is a tool for searching for text from files. It searches in real-time as you type.

Clicking a match will open the file in a text editor, right clicking will open the folder where the file is in. You can customize these commands if you want to open them in different programs.

I created this mainly to help me with videogame modding so I can more easily search for things from the scripts and config files.

Current status

STST is feature complete, but there's a couple things that could be done:

• Make scrollbar interactable.
• Make text inputs scroll horizontally if needed.
• Allow more flexible searches, for example patterns/regex, multi-line queries.
• Automatically store search history. This feature technically already exists, but the problem is that you never "apply" the search so I'm not sure when/what to save.
• Ability to filter paths in the whitelist/blacklist. The main reason I didn't do this is because I'm not sure how to format it, for example if you want a filter like *hello*, how do you control whether "hello" can be in the path or just the filename or both? I guess you could use a symbol to enable path search, for example *hello* will not search the path but :*hello* will, then you could use :*hello*: to search only path, and :*hello*:*hello* to require the match to be in the path AND the file.
• Caching/performance.
  • STST currently restarts the search from scratch every time you type a character, the program doesn't cache anything other than the text that is shown for matches (Windows likely does some caching though which makes subsequent searches faster). There should probably be caching of file paths and/or file data, but it didn't feel necessary so I didn't bother adding it. The main reason I haven't bothered to do this is because I'd have to track file changes and dynamically update parts of the cache.
  • When you type a character to the end of the query, the search doesn't need to restart, it just has to re-check the existing matches and remove the ones that no longer match the query. I can't take advantage of this due to the way some things are currently set up (the program doesn't store the location of all matches, just the beginning of every line that has a match).
  • Another huge way to optimize would be to read the hard drive directly (master file table), but I don't know how to do that. I looked into it but it was a confusing mess, I couldn't find a clear explanation of how NTFS (the file system that Windows uses) works, and everyone uses a lot of terminology that assumes you already know things that I don't know. You're "not supposed" to read it, NTFS is proprietary, so that's mainly why nobody has a good explanation, but anyone who manages to do it seems to achieve incredible speed gains. I also tried to copy the relevant source code from WinDirStat, but it didn't work for some reason.

Linux version may happen some day.

Mac version not planned.

Download

Report bugs/problems or request features: find my contact here.