I don’t exaggerate when I say that PowerGREP is the most powerful and versatile regular expression search and text processing tool available worldwide today. But that doesn’t mean PowerGREP is complicated or difficult to use. While it will certainly take some practice to get the most out of PowerGREP, this “getting started” section will show you PowerGREP is surprisingly convenient to use.
1. You start with telling PowerGREP which files you want to work with. Click on a file or folder in the File Selector. Then select Include File or Folder in the File Selector menu to mark the file or folder to be searched through. Marking a folder is a quick way to work with all the files in that folder. Later I will show you how you can search through only certain files in a folder without marking them individually.
2. Then, you tell what PowerGREP should do with those files, by by defining an action on the Action panel. For a simple search, select “simple search” in the drop-down list labeled “action type” at the top of the Action panel. For a search-and-replace, select “search-and-replace” in the “action type” list. If you just want to search for some text, select “literal text” as the “search type”. Enter the text you want to find in the search box.
3. Click the Preview button in the toolbar to start the search.
4. Inspect the search results on the Results panel. Double-click on a match to open the file in the editor and see its context. If you’ve previewed or executed a search-and-replace, you can make or revert some or all replacements via the Results and Editors menus or toolbars.
That’s all it takes! PowerGREP’s power and complexity remain hidden when you don’t need it, making PowerGREP surprisingly easy to use.