Search parameters

In the main window, you can enter the phrase to search for and to replace with. If you have selected Regular expressions mode, you can use metacharacters in the search pattern.

Search modes

• Match case. If this option is not selected, Aba will search for the text regardless of its case. For example, if you look for Windows, the program will find Windows, windows, or WINDOWS. If this option is selected, Aba will find only Windows, i.e. exact combination of capital and small letters that you specified.
• Match whole word. If this option is not selected, Aba will find the letters you entered in any word. For example, if you search for activ, the program will find active, activities, inactive, hyperactive, and even attractive. Common letter combinations such as and occur in unrelated words (thousand, standard), so you may want to select this option. In this case, Aba will find only the whole words (e.g., active will mean active and nothing else).
• Regular expressions. If this option is selected, you can use regular expressions in the search pattern. Note that some characters have a special meaning in the regular expression mode, so you will need to escape them. For example, if you searched for [i] (the letter I in square brackets), you will need to change it to \[i\] when switching to regular expression mode.

Browse for files

By pressing the Browse button, you can select the folder to search in.

File masks. When you select a folder, the program adds the *.* file mask (all files) to the folder path, for example, C:\My Documents\*.*. You can enter a different mask in the field, e.g., *.txt to find all text files. If you want to specify several masks or files in one folder, please use | to separate them. For example, use C:\Website\*.txt|*.htm|*.html to search in text and HTML files stored in the C:\Website folder.

Just like in other Windows programs, * in the file mask matches any number of characters and ? matches one character or nothing.

Skip subdirectories. You can uncheck Include subdirectories if you want to search only in C:\Website, but not in C:\Website\News or C:\Website\AboutUs. When you uncheck Include subdirectories, Aba adds *?.* to the mask. This is a notation specific for Aba and not supported in other programs. You can combine it with normal masks, for example: C:\My Documents\*?.txt to find all text files in C:\My Documents, but not in its subdirectories. The question mark must come after any star: *?

If you select several files in Explorer, then run Aba from the context menu, the Browse button shows you not the folder selection dialog, but the file selection dialog. You can select several files in this dialog by holding the Ctrl key and clicking the files to select.

The drop-down list shows you the last 20 directories that you searched in. You can select a folder from this list to search in it again.

You can also select the files in Explorer and run Aba from the context menu.