indexing and searching contents in project folder

Question

Hi, Every time I try to find out a variable or string or some text in my codes (in project folder), I am in trouble. It seems I don't know easy techniques to do that.

I was wondering if there is any tool which indexes a specified folder (in my case project folder) and updates in real-time (with updating codes). Also any string can be searched easily (which ever file/s in that project folder contain that string)?

Is there any bult-in support or plugin for Eclipse or Netbeans? (as both of those IDEs index all the codes, so there should be)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

exuberant ctags does the indexing you desire. I would imagine plugins exist for many IDEs (it works with vim, which is all I use).

For this general use case, I tend to just use ack from the command line. It is a reasonably fast "grep"-like tool that is well suited for code. It also probably has plugins for a variety of IDEs/text editors.

These are fairly minimal, unix style solutions, but I have found them to meet most of the needs I have even in large, tangled projects.

Answer 2

Since Netbeans 6.5 you have a Quick Search Bar (mostly at the top right), which searches your project folder (and more).