I have to change some connection strings in an incredibly old legacy application, and the programmers who made it thought it would be a great idea to plaster the entire app with connection strings all over the place.
Visual Studio’s ‘current project’ search is incredible slow, and I don’t trust Windows Search.
So, what’s the best free, non-indexed text search tool out there? All it should do is return a list with files that contain the wanted string inside a folder and its subfolders.
I’m running Windows 2003 Server.
Original Answer
Windows Grep does this really well.
Edit: Windows Grep is no longer being maintained or made available by the developer. An alternate download link is here: Windows Grep – alternate
Current Answer
Visual Studio Code has excellent search and replace capabilities across files. It is extremely fast, supports regex and live preview before replacement.