Searching and Grepping
The conventional search with -> requires you to specify the full search term before starting. Most of the time, it is much faster to search incrementally. If you click into the edit field labeled ISearch in the toolbar, the search is performed as you type. You will find that often the desired term is already found after typing in 3 or 4 letters.
Both search mechanisms described above are restricted to searching within one source file. An additional tool which allows you to search through a (possibly large) number of files is available through the item in the menu. It is basically a frontend for the grep(1) program.
In the dialog, you can specify which files are searched. There is a number of wildcard patterns available in a combobox. In this way, you can easily restrict the find mechanism to header files. Furthermore, you specify a directory where the search is started. If you check the box, the search iterates through all directories in the hierarchy below this one.
The search term is in general a regular expression following POSIX syntax.
For example, you can use the term "\<K.*" if you want to
find all words which begin with the letter K. The following characters
are interpreted in a special way:
.
| Matches any character |
^
| Matches the beginning of a line |
$
| Matches the end of a line |
\<
| Matches the beginning of a word |
\>
| Matches the end of a word |
?
| The preceding item matches less than once |
*
| The preceding item is matched zero or more times |
+
| The preceding item is matched once or more times |
{n}
| The preceding item is matched exactly n times |
{n,}
| The preceding item is matched n or more times |
{,n}
| The preceding item matches less than n times |
{n,m}
|
The preceding item matches at least n times but less
than m times
|
Backreferences to bracketed subexpressions are also available by the notation
\n.
For C++ programmers, as special bonus there are some search templates available for typical patterns. These allow you to search for example all calls of member functions of a certain object.
Once you start the search by clicking on the button, it will be performed by an external, asynchronous process. All found items will appear in the view called Grep. You can then jump to the found items by clicking on them. Note that grep scans the files as they stored in the file system. If you have modified versions of them in your editor, you may get some mismatches in the line number, or some found items will be invalid. You can avoid this by saving all files beforehand.
