Hermetic MultiFile Search 9.66

Overview

In case you often need to search for text in files, then perhaps Windows search is not the best tool that you can use for it.  So, a great tool with this kind of functionality and many features is Hermetic MultiFile Search, since it allows you to perfrom text searches on files with many configurations and find anything you need quickly and efficiently.

Installation

To install Hermetic MultiFile Search just launch the installer and let the setup wizard guide you through the steps, which are very few actually. You won’t have to go configure any advanced settings whatsoever, so don’t worry about that. The main installation process will be complete in no time as well.

No malicious items (viruses, trojans, etc.) are included in the setup package, and no 3^rd-party advertised apps are distributed with it either.

Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 (32/64-bit).

Interface

The first time you run the program you will be asked to enter a license key in order to activate the program and use the full version instead of the trial version (this is optional of course).

The program’s interface is very plain and doesn’t resemble a modern app’s interface at all. More particularly, the main window is medium-sized and has a rectangular shape with a light-blue color in the background, on top of which there is some explanatory text and a few buttons.

In order to perform a search operation, you can either use the “Call up the index module” button or the “Call up the search module” button, both of which will bring up a new window of similar looks, each one with its corresponding contents.

Pros

The program can be used to search within any type of file that contains ANSI text characters (plus whitespace), such as typical text files, HTML files, XML files, Word files, etc. Additionally, non-English characters are supported too.

Hermetic MultiFile Search is used in the following way: first you run the Index module, which creates an index of the files you want to search by specifying their locations, and then you run the Search module, which is the program’s function responsible for searching in the index that was created beforehand. After an index is created, then the results for any search will be returned in a few seconds.

In the index module, you can define a top folder and its subfolders for scanning, as well as choose files that you don’t want to include. Furthermore, you can select a minimum and maximum filesize (in bytes) for inclusion and save settings for future use. Regarding the search module, you can select a single or several index files, and configure various settings: sort files found by search word occurrence, generate report on completion of search (in HTML or text), include descriptions in report, define maximum number of extracts, and others.

Additionally, the user has the ability to search for: a single word, any word in a set of words, all words in a set of words, or an exact phrase. These options make it quite easy to find what you're looking for in a variety of occasions, in which searching for just a single word or phrase is not practical.

When the search operation is finished, the results are displayed in a webpage and the user is able to click on them in order to open the corresponding files. Also, each result contains a preview of the line that includes the searched words.

Cons

The program could have a better look, but it’s functional and serves its purpose.

Alternatives

Agent Ransack (freemium), DocFetcher (free), FileSearchy (paid), PowerGREP (paid), Searchmonkey (free) and XSearch (free) are just some of the tool that are available for searching contents in files. Out of those, Agent Ransack and XSearch are the best choices.

Conclusion

Hermetic MultiFile Search is a really nice utility for searching within files for their contents, and is very efficient due to its indexing mechanism that is suitable for processing large amounts of files, multiple times. Highly recommended program.