FinderSeeker

A fast file and content search for Windows. It reads the file system directly, in parallel, and does not use Windows Search or its index, so the results are always current and nothing has to be indexed first.

Searching

Criteria
Look in	One or more folders or drives (separate with ;), or All local drives. Folders you have used are remembered.
Name	Matched as wildcards (*.cs;*.vb, a name with no wildcard finds names containing it), plain text, or a regular expression. Optional match case.
Contains	Text to find inside files, as plain text, a wildcard pattern or a regular expression. Optional match case.
Size	At least / at most, in bytes, KB, MB or GB.
Dates	Modified and created, after and/or before.
Other	Include hidden / system items, search binary files, skip text files over a size.

Results appear while the search runs and can be sorted by any column. For a content search the Match column shows the line number and the text around the first match.

Double-click (or Enter) opens a result; the right-click menu opens its folder in Explorer and copies paths.

Content search notes

• Plain text is found with vectorized searches over large blocks of the file, and can contain a line break.
• Wildcard and regular expression patterns are matched one line at a time (. and \s do not cross a line break; ^ and $ mean the start and end of a line). A pattern that takes more than two seconds on a file skips that file.
• Files are read as UTF-8, or UTF-8/16/32 when they start with a byte order mark. A file that has zero bytes in its first 4 KB and no byte order mark is treated as binary and skipped, unless Search binary files is ticked (then it is read as single-byte text).
• Files that are open in other programs can still be read.

Preview

The panel on the right (View > Preview panel, F11) shows the selected result: images (bmp, png, jpg, gif, tif, ico, emf, wmf) as a picture, text files as text with the content search's matches highlighted, other files as a hex dump of their beginning, and folders as a count of what is inside.

Keyboard

Key
Enter / F5	Search
Esc	Stop
Ctrl+F / Ctrl+Shift+F	Go to Name / Contains
Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C	Select all results, copy their paths
F11	Show or hide the preview

Theme

The app follows the Windows light/dark setting (restart it after changing the Windows theme).

Languages

The app uses the Windows display language. To use another, choose File > Language...; it applies at once and is remembered (the "Language" setting, a culture name such as de or pt-BR; empty follows Windows). Text with no translation is shown in English.

The localization engine is the NTDLS.Localization project in this repository (a NuGet package, see its README), which also provides ILocalizer for passing the localizer to other libraries. Translations are in a SQLite file, FinderSeeker/Translations/Translations.db, copied next to the program. The table Translation has one row for each English phrase and one column for each language; the English text (the Phrase column) is the key. Text that the Windows Forms designer puts on a form is translated automatically when the form is created (FormLocalizer), so designer text needs nothing in the code. In code, wrap text for people in Localize:

Text = Localize("Search");
MessageBox.Show(Localize("Folder {0} does not exist.", folder));

To add new phrases to the database and translate the empty cells, run LocalizerScan.bat (it runs the LocalizerScan project in this repository and needs the Einkr key in C:\EinkrKey.txt).

Where things are kept

What	Where
Settings and history	%AppData%\NTDLS\FinderSeeker\settings.json
Logs	%LocalAppData%\NTDLS\FinderSeeker\Logs (Help > Open log folder)

Building

Requires the .NET 10 SDK. The solution is FinderSeeker.slnx.

dotnet build FinderSeeker.slnx
dotnet test Tests/Tests.csproj

To build the installer (needs Inno Setup 6), publish self-contained and then compile Installer/Installer.iss:

dotnet publish FinderSeeker/FinderSeeker.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained