This was not a good weekend for me. Work. I was given a dozen text documents to work on that had to be completed by Monday.
Some of the documents were a mess—filled with bad formatting, crazy text, and many phrases and words that needed to be replaced and rewritten. Mac tools to the rescue! Make that, free Mac tools. Tools that find text in documents and replace them with different text. Here’s a good one.
Out With The Bad, In With The Good
To be honest about my love hate relationship my text editors, I love the delete key, live with copy and paste, cherish the squiggly red line that tells me my spelling needs correcting, and I know full well that find and replace is your friend.
TexFinderX is one of a number of Mac apps that find and replace text in documents.
Every Mac text editor, free or otherwise, has the ability to search, find, replace text. It’s the norm of text, right? Not all Mac apps are created equal. Some require the find and replace only work on a single document at a time.
Oh, the shame of such shortsightedness. Even Apple’s wonderfully simple TextEdit confines your find and replace fetish to the document you’re working on at the time. What if, just what if, you have a dozen text documents and the address or a snippet of code needs to be change in each one?
Sorry, 12 files to open, find, replace, save, rinse and repeat doesn’t cut it in my little corner of Productivityland.
TexFinderX digs through multiple files in a folder to find the text you want, show you what it looks like, and gives you the option of replacing it with something else.
This whole find and replace process is left to right driven.
All the files with the text you want to search for and find are in the left column of the app. The center column will display the searched for result. And the right column displays the replacement result.
That means you get to see what the replaced text will be before it’s replaced.
Setup and usage is easy, too. Drag and drop a folder onto TexFinderX’s main window. Enter the text you want to find and the text you want to replace. To ensure safety, on the fly backup copies of files can be made fore replacing the text.
The search and replace can be confined to specific files in a folder.
Since all text, Mac or Windows, isn’t created equal, TexFinderX has a replacement table that does DOS to Mac, Unix to Mac, Line Feed to Carriage Return, even text to HTML.
The only problem with TexFinderX is knowing when to use it. If you have to search through multiple text documents to replace specific strings of text, TexFinderX is a pretty good first step and priced just right. Free.
About Natalia Nowak
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