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 mostly feature complete, but there's a couple things missing:

• Blacklist/whitelist for file names.
• Make scrollbar interactable.
• Automatically store search history. This feature already exists, but the problem is that you never "apply" the search so I'm not sure when/what to save.
• Caching/performance.
  • STST currently restarts the search from scratch every time you type a character, there's no caching of anything from the program's side (Windows likely does some caching though).
  • There should probably be some kind of caching of file paths and/or file data, but it didn't feel necessary so I didn't bother adding it. I'd have to track file changes so I can update the cache, and there might be issues with that (I'm concerned something gets stuck and a file/folder becomes un-editable).
  • Another huge optimization 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.

Linux version may happen some day.

Mac version not planned.

Download

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