Best Search and Replace Text in multiple files Tool on Windows/Mac/Linux

Find all files in a directory, replace text, preview results, optional regular expression mode - freeware VS Code

Free Download (Windows, Mac and Linux)

Suppose you have the following folder structure:

mybook/easiestsoft.com

And you want to replace text in files under the easiestsoft.com folder, processed as follows:

  • Click the Free Download link on the page to download the free VS Code text editor, and install it

  • Navigate to mybook folder in your PC, Right click on the mybook folder and select Open with Code (Please note we right-click on the parent folder of easiestsoft.com)

    VS Code right click on folder to open with Code

  • Right click on easiestsoft.com in the left panel of VS Code, select Find in Folder...

    VS Code find in folder menu

  • Now we can find and replace text in multiple files in a folder. The window consists mainly of 4 lines:

    • Search (Enter search text here)

    • Replace (Enter the text to be replace with)

    • files to include

      ./easiestsoft.com

    • files to exclude

    Find, Replace, files to include, files to exclude

  • Suppose you want to replace easiestsoft.com to easiestsoft.com

    VS Code to preview replace result

    It's amazing that you can preview the results of replacement. This is a very import feature, it prevents us from making mistakes

    The only problem is that the window is too small for us to see the full results. We can drag the border to enlarge the window

    Now we can clearly see the replacement results:

    VS Code preview before replacement and after replacement

    If you want to see more clearly, you can click an item to view it in full window

  • Perform Replace All after confirming preview results

    VS Code perform replace all

Question time

  • How to replace text in files with specific extension (for example, .html)

    files to include: ./easiestsoft.com/**/*.html

    VS Code Files to include .html extension only

  • How to replace text in files with extensions .html or .md

    files to include: ./easiestsoft.com/**/*.html, ./easiestsoft.com/**/*.md

  • How to exclude specific folders from search, for example exclude private and tmp folder

    files to exclude: ./easiestsoft.com/**/private/, ./easiestsoft.com/**/tmp/

    VS Code search files to be exclude

  • What does ** and * mean in ./easiestsoft.com/**/*.html

    There are called glob pattern (or wildcard) and are used by git (in .gitignore) and other software, usually used to match paths

Search and Replace text in many files with Regex (Regular Expression)

  • How to Search and Replace text in Regex mode

    Click Use Regular Expression icon to enable Regex Mode:

    VS Code enable Use Regular Expression option

  • How to remove space form the end of all lines using Regular Expression

    • Search: \s+$
    • Replace:

    VS Code remove space from the end of lines

  • How to remove . (period) from the end of all lines using Regex

    King Eca: For web text, there is no need to add . at the end of the line, because we usually separate lines with new lines. So adding . at the end of the line is like adding it to the beginning of the line, which is of course unnecessary

    I'm a philosopher and probably the greatest ever, and I train my self to avoid doing anything unnecessary. I remove all . at the end of lines of my text using Regular Expression:

    • Search: (\w)\s*\.\s*$
    • Replace: $1

    VS Code Regex Remove period . from the end of lines

    It seems I am the first person in the world to actively avoid such unnecessary thing

2019-12-15 King Eca