Documentation / User interface / Options dialog
Options dialog
The Options dialog lets you set up the appearance and the behavior of Aba.
On the left, there are controls for selecting the width of the context view pane and the color of occurrences.
Skip binary files. This box lists the extensions of the files that will be skipped during search. The extensions are separated with spaces and newlines. You can add the extensions used by your favorite applications here.
Most binary files contain non-textual data such as pictures, music, or compiled programs. These files may be large, for example, a typical MP3 file contains several megabytes of sound data. It does not make any sense to search for text in such files, so Aba skips the binary files to save your time. However, you can search in binary files if you wish so.
File comparison tool. These are the full name and command-line parameters of the program that will be used for comparison if you have changed your files after replacing and now want them to be reverted to backup copy. By default, this field is blank, so no comparison tool will be run. Enter compare.bat "%1" "%2" to use fc (standard console-mode tool). If you have another comparison tool installed, you can enter its name here (use %1 and %2 for the names of files).
This comparison tool is used so rarely that this option doesn't really matter for most users. You can leave this field blank.
Maximum number of matches. The limit is introduced to filter out frequent search patterns, which otherwise will degrade Aba's performance (read full explanation). The default value is 1024 matches, which works even on old computers with limited amount of RAM. If you have got enough memory, you can increase the limit; for example, set it to 16384 matches if you have 1 GB of RAM. To test this setting, select some large folder and search for one letter in it. If you experience slowdown or see “Out of memory” messages, then you need to decrease the limit.
Storage of the settings. The options and language files are stored in AppData folder. On Windows XP, it is c:\Documents and Settings\Your name\Application Data\Aba; on Windows Vista it is c:\Users\Your name\AppData\Roaming\Aba. Ini and lng files are encoded in UTF-8. Aba Search and Replace does not write anything to your registry.