Windows Grep

A recent project I’ve been working on was built with Ruby on Rails. Anyone who has had the experience of starting to learn RoR by working on another person’s already built project may agree with me – finding how things are generated is difficult. When I wanted to change text or learn where the design was stored, I had a rough time. Then I discovered Windows Grep.

Windows Grep allows users to do in depth file searches. The user can define a string to search (or a regular expression) and specify a directory and file types and the program searches within the file’s contents.

In case you were not aware, Grep comes from a unix command and is an ancronym for Global Regular Expression Print. There are variations of this tool for windows, but I am drawn to Windows Grep because of its GUI layout and informative search results.

I used this tool by looking at a web page on rails, viewing it’s source, copying a small string of text that I thought would be unique, and pasting it into Windows Grep to find results. It certainly helped with the beginning stages of learning my way around the project.

Windows Grep can be found here: http://www.wingrep.com/