Introducing His Grepship,
by His Nerdship Pty Ltd
His Grepship is a Windows-based visual tool that searches text files on your PC and network for search expressions (i.e. words or phrases). It can descend through sub-directories to extend the search. It runs on all 32-bit Windows systems. His Grepship is loosely based on the UNIX grep utility. However, it goes much further than the original. Features include:
The found search expressions are highlighted in an output list in a Windows list box, along with the line and surrounding text. You can also view neighbouring lines above and below the lines containing the search expression. This allows you to see the context of each expression.
His Grepship can read and write Unicode files, both big- and little-endian.
His Grepship can do global find and replace (text swapping). For instance you can change all occurrences of "Smith" in all your text files to "Jones". You may optionally confirm/reject each change, and as a final safeguard you can also roll back the changes after you have made them. This operation is UNIX-smart, i.e. it will maintain UNIX line-endings.
You may associate His Grepship with certain text editors (see the Associated Text Editors section). Later when His Grepship has finished a search and displayed all found search expressions in the output list box, you may double-click any line. His Grepship will then activate the selected editor to open the file containing the expression you clicked, and take you right to the correct line. The cursor will be sitting on the expression, ready for editing. If you don't have any of the editors on the list, you may use the built-in editor that comes standard with His Grepship. This achieves the same effect.
His Grepship incorporates the powerful Regex++ regular expression library, allowing wildcard/regular expression searches. Thanks to Eddie Diener of TropicSoft for making this excellent library available.
His Grepship comes with a comprehensive and easy-to-use Help. Image maps allow you to click on any item to get a full description of that item. It has a large glossary and index to explain unfamiliar terms. Clicking a Help button in any window brings up the Help page relevant to that window, and from there you may use links and/or the Table of Contents to navigate to any other page. If you are new to His Grepship, there is a Tutorial browse sequence to familiarise you with the main points.
His Grepship may be downloaded from this site for a 30-day trial period. If you choose to buy it, click on the Ordering His Grepship link to order it.
Click here to see the PAD (Portable Application Descriptor) file describing His Grepship. This file format has been created by the Association of Shareware Professionals. It acts as a standard way to describe a program.
Enough talk. Let's move on the the first item, the main window:
As can be seen in the above example, His Grepship has sought all occurrences of the text TPositionForm in all files ending with .cpp, and .h in the directories D:\CPP work\Grepship and D:\CPP work\lib\include. The found expression is highlighted in red.
Double-clicking any of these lines causes His Grepship to open the relevant file in the selected editor, and take you to the line and expression you clicked.
Extra context information is displayed when you check the Neigbouring lines option. His Grepship will then display the lines above and below the search expression. In the following example, the user has requested 2 lines above the matching line, and 3 lines below.
One feature of His Grepship that makes it very useful to software developers is its ability to activate either its own built-in editor, or optionally certain popular 3rd party editors. You can select an editor from the Choose a default text editor window.
When His Grepship performs a search and sends its output to the output list, you can double-click on an output line and the selected editor will be activated on the relevant file. The cursor will be placed on the correct line, and in most editors, on the search expression itself, ready for editing.
The built-in editor is pretty basic, based on the standard Rich Edit control. It has about the same capabilities as the standard Windows text editor Notepad.exe (i.e not very much!). If you have one of the associated editors, you can download the relevant DLL and associate it with His Grepship. Currently these editors are Vim, Lemmy, WinEdit and TextPad. More can be added later if you can persuade me!
This is a shot of the built-in editor, after the user has double-clicked a line containing kIgnoreCase.
And a similar shot when Vim is the default editor:
You can also make global text replacements with His Grepship. You can optionally confirm or reject each replacement, and as an extra safety measure you can abort all changes after you have made them. Here the user wishes to convert selected instances of int to short. As replacements are made, the original and modified lines are displayed in the main window.
