FAR - Find And Replace

What is FAR?

FAR is a simple tool for search and replace operations over multiple files. You can apply ordinary "word by word" replacement, or choose to use fully featured regular expressions.

FAR automatically creates backups (unless you deselect this option) and is designed to operate on files dispersed over entire directory trees.
For your comfort you may define search strings that span multiple lines by just typing multiple lines - no obscure construct like "$\r?(?s:.)^" is required.

FAR wants to be this application that you only need once a year - but then you badly need it.

Why so FAR?

FAR has been created out of the need to change the layout of a website with hundreds of html pages. While all editors know "find and replace", and many support regular expressions, there is only a few that allows to:

• Change a selection of files from different directories at once.
• Allow search (and replace) patterns that span multiple lines.

Eventually FAR seeks to be fully platform independent. Being written in Java, it runs where Java runs.

How FAR Then?

Future development will be guided by user feedback and personal experience. Support for file renaming and grep like extractions is likely to come. The capabilities of the build in text viewer might be extended as well, but all this shall be guided by two major concerns: stability and usability.

Who is FAR?

FAR has been written by Olivier Wehner. I am a Java developer and I can't help it - I have no other hobbies.

SourceForge Links

• Download the latest version.
• Browse the project site.
• View the screenshots
• Get involved and get the sources.
• Submit a bug or post a comment.

Project News
Number One!	22-07-2009
Version 1.0 is out with polishing and bug fixes and a tiny enhancement: You can now define patterns to exclude files from you search. Comes in handy if you are looking for files that are missing a particular entry. Give it a try!
A Fix To Win	09-06-2009
Sorry for those who ran into this: On Windows you where blocked when you tried to make two (2) replace operations on the same file! You would just get red lines in you file list, and maybe a silly error message. 0.9.7 fixes this.
First Ardent Release	03-06-2009
Here comes FAR, the brand new cross platform Find And Replace utilitiy. Check it out!

System Requirements

FAR requires Java 1.5 (or later) in your path. Run
:> java -version
on your command line to verify you have it. FAR comes with .bat scripts for Windows and .sh for X. More comfortable launchers may be added in the future.

Installation & Removal:

Unpack the archive (zip or tar.gz) at a location of your choice, e.g. "C:\Program Files" or "/opt". The archive will create a subdirectory "far" that contains everything. To uninstall, delete that directory.

Unpacking the Sources

Extract the tarball into a directory of you choice. It will create a subdirectory "far" that contains the sources. You can extract source and binary version into the same directory but you are not encouraged to do so.

License

FAR is free to use at no charge for anyone, company or individual.

FAR is released under the GNU General Public License version 3.0. It includes libraries from the Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org), published under Apache License 2.0.

Parts of the FAR sources are actually put under LGPL in order to allow using the core classes in other, non GPL environments.