If you use desktop search on windows Vista or XP or Windows 7 you must have faced the annoyance of using Windows search.It’s simply irritating to see that green bar shining intermittently without showing that important as hell, file, you know exists!!!!! Windows XP search is also inadequate though less annoying as compared to Vista. After a long struggle with Vista’s inbuilt search I decided to look for alternatives.My search took me to myriad forums and blogs where people were venting their frustration with Windows Vista search.Some users even demanded XP search function in Vista which obviously has no takers at Microsoft. But extensive search brought me to a great free utility named Baregrep by Baremetalsoft.com which serves amazingly well to answer most of my desktop search needs on windows based machines.
Its tiny (No installer.Click to use) but powerful.It has a clean interface and simple to understand GUI based navigation.Most importantly..ITS FAST. It searches as you type and has support for Wildcard (*.doc,*.c etc) and regular expressions or Regex (literal like “India” or(\S+\.pdf)).
It supports a lot of numeric and alpha-numeric quantifiers to make your search a breeze.You can also search text within the files and perform subfolders search. It searches Hidden folders by default.Baregrep search utility has both free and pro versions.The only difference is you see a startup splash screen in free version (which is for a few seconds and is lot more tolerable than that shining green bar :D).Give Baregrep a try and I am sure you will never have to grope in the dark for your own files on your own system.You can download the free desktop search version here.
This post was originally published on Indigic.com
