GREP Preferences

Click the Preferences button on the toolbar at the top to adjust RegexBuddy to your tastes and habits. The GREP page is one of three pages on the Preferences window.

The options “hide hidden files and folders” and “hide system files and folders” are turned on by default. These make all files and folders that have the hidden or system attribute set invisible to the GREP panel. Turn these options off if you want to grep through hidden and system files and folders.

Choose “use file masks to hide files and folders” to use traditional wildcard file masks to hide files and folders from the GREP panel. Choose “use regular expressions to hide files and folders” to use regular expressions to hide files and folders. Wildcards have to match the entire name of the file or folder to hide it. Regular expressions hide any file or folder with a name matched by the regex, even if the name is only matched partially. The regular expression “joe”, for example, hides all files that contain “joe” anywhere in the file name. The equivalent file mask using wildcards is “*joe*”. When using wildcards, “joe” hides files exactly named “joe” only.

In the “hide files” box you can enter a semicolon-delimited list of file masks or regular expressions. All files of which the names match one of these file masks are automatically skipped by the GREP panel. By default, the permanent exclusion masks are set to a regular expression that matches all backup files created by RegexBuddy, as well as temporary working copies of files created by EditPad Pro and MS Office. If you’d ever need to search through backup files or working copies, you will need to adjust the permanent exclusion file masks first.

The “hide folders” box works in the same way, except that the file masks you specify are tested against individual folder names. If the name of a folder matches one of these file masks then the GREP panel automatically skips that folder and any files or folders inside that folder. The default settings exclude __history, which is the folder name that RegexBuddy uses for backup files when you select the “hidden history” backup option. Also excluded by default is .svn which is the folder name that Subversion uses to cache data in each folder that you have added to version control.

If you want to configure the color palette used by the GREP panel then click the GREP colors button on the Editors page in the Preferences dialog.