People who have tried Linux a couple of times, know about a wonderful file searching tool called grep. This tool is found only in the Linux distributions and can work magic when searching for files or when searching within files. Now the Windows users can also use a grep like tool called dnGrep. It offers all the features available in the Linux version of grep.
The main difference between the grep of Linux and the dnGrep is that the latter comes with a GUI. You can install dnGrep on your Windows system and it integrates itself with the Windows File Explorer. After this is done, you can simply right-click on any folder and choose dnGrep from the context-menu in order to search that folder.
In the user interface of dnGrep, you can specify the search terms in many different formats – RegEx, XPath, Plain Text, or Phonetic. You can choose to search inside archives if you have files packed inside archives. It supports ZIP, 7Z, RAR, JAR type of archives. You can choose the replace the searched text with something else and use dnGrep as a search-and-replacement tool.
dnGrep can search not only within text files, but also inside Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and PDF documents. Out of all the search query methods, Phonetic method is the most interesting. It can find the words that sound the same. So if you search for Terry, it will find all the words that sound like Terry such as Kerry, Perry, Larry, Harry and more.
dnGrep brings the power of grep tool from Linux to Windows users. It also adds some extra goodies with a really nice user interface. It integrates in the File Explorer so that you can quickly select a folder for searching using the dnGrep tool. It is ideal for people who work with many files such as programmers, writers, bloggers or accountants.
You can download dnGrep from https://dngrep.github.io/.