TextCrawler Free

TextCrawler is a resourceful tool developed to help users search for files across the computer and removable devices, even inside file content. It includes a wide array of options which mainly cater to advanced users.

Installation does not take long. The interface is not particularly intuitive but cluttered with a lot of elements, making it difficult to tell apart the steps needed to take for performing a search.

It is possible to point out files, folders or drives (with or without subdirectories) to look for text in, replace text strings with something else, insert words before or after a specified text block, as well as clear or delete them.

You can enable case sensitive mode, look for whole words only, search for and replace regular expressions, perform a fuzzy search and select the tolerance level, as well as establish command lines to be executed in batch mode.

The list of results shows the name, path, matches, size, date of modification, type and encoding method for each identified file containing the search string. On the bottom part of the panel you can view file content with the target word/expression highlighted.

Other options of TextCrawler let you insert symbols in the search string from a character map, test regular expressions, view and save a scratchpad, list files with no matches, export the match list to CSV format, open an item's location in Explorer, and so on.

The application may take a file to complete a scan job but it is usually very fast. It has a good response time and uses a moderate-to-high amount of RAM. We have not come across any issues in our tests, since the tool did not hang or crash.

Apart from the fact that the interface could be restructured for the sake of intuitiveness, TextCrawler should please users who are looking for advanced settings concerning search tools.