The software AnyTxt Searcher has come a long way since I last looked at it in 2020. It is still being actively developed, and the changelog shows it had a lot of attention in 2023. Useful for scholars, it’s genuine Windows freeware to build an index of the text inside likely file types (.PDF, .DOC, etc, including .ePUB) and then it very quickly searches for keywords inside these. The latest Christmas 2023 version can also index the contents of .ZIP files and even .ISO disk images. It can also OCR documents that don’t have copy-able text.
The old screenshots are offputting. Seen above is what mine looks like, with dark mode and an Advanced search run (which allows search “by phrase” and more). The indexing / results / opening speed, and the ranking of results, are all very pleasing.
For coders such as myself, scripts (e.g. .PY Python scripts or .BAT files) can be indexed by adding the file type from a huge list: Options > Index Manager > Index Rules > Add > Select > double-click on .PY, Add.
All that AnyTxt seems to be lacking for scholars of the fantastic is the ability to proximity search. For instance Newport w/20 tower (find instances of the word Newport if it occurs within 20 words of the word tower), which is the syntax the expensive $250 dtSearch Desktop uses in Boolean mode. The $40 Docfetcher Pro also has proximity, though in a clunkier format and Docfetcher Pro lacks a dark mode.
AnyTxt Searcher does has some basic advanced search operators, but not the NEAR that would partially emulate a proximity search.
Update: It can do proximity, though only with a very clunky regex: \b(?:hobbits\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?supper|supper\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?hobbits)\b
Still, in 2024 AnyTxt Searcher is now a nice free solution for Windows, assuming you want an alternative to whatever search the newer versions of Windows offer as standard. Pleasant and very fast to use, and you’d only need to go to the much uglier dtSearch Desktop, or Docfetcher Pro, for an occasionally-needed proximity search.
A good advert for supporting the lone freeware developer who’s trying to do something you want done. He may get there eventually, and in this case it’s taken the developer some five years to get close to perfection. As the veteran freeware sniffers at Major Geeks say of the software, “a really nice piece of programming”.
