Line searches

Posted by Francis Morrone
Nov 18, 2006 at 05:59 AM

After looooong experience with information managers, I find that one of the features that matters most to me is what I think we call “line searches,” i.e., search queries that show every line in which a search term appears. For example, suppose I am searching in a tree-based outliner for “Balzac.” Some of my “articles” may be just a few words, some may be a thousand words or more. When I search for “Balzac,” I don’t want to know just which articles contain that term, I want to know which *lines* contain that term. At the very least, I want the search results pane to tell me how many times the term appears in a given article, and then provide an easy way to drill down. And I want this search to be global—across at least all open files. So far, I have found that among “PIMs,” only the obsolete KeyNote and the word-processing suite Nota Bene provide this functionality. My text editor, UltraEdit (which IMHO is the gold standard of Windows text editors) provides this functionality, but I’d like to see it in a rich-text environment, with all the other outlining/PIM-like functionality. I hope I am making myself clear, but this seems to me as though it ought to be one of the most basic functions of an organizer. Am I missing any programs out there?