#71 Firth experiences with CodeXCavator

[Sharlene]

For a long time I have been looking for a good code seach and indexing tool. We still use this tool: http://s3.amazonaws.com/redtree/wilbur/index.html and it is a gem, but not longer active and sometimes crashes.

What is great about CodeXCavator:

• It can handle many files, actually index 200,000 source code files, no problem. YES!
• Extensive options for filtering what gets searched. You can select which file types to include, which directory etc.
• Seems to generically handle text files with arbitrary extensions, thank you for that!
• Stable: Not one crash or exception so far.

What can be improved:

• First impressions: When you install it, your first instinct is to run CodeXCavator.exe. The fact that it gives an error about a missing index file is not that enlighting, and you have to study the wiki and set one up. It would be nice if the view could present a dialog box to set up a basic one or let you pick a recent one and use it by default. This will make a big difference for first time users trying it out. I almost thought it was missing installation files or something and abandoned it.
• It is not obvious enough that the search is case sensitive by default. So it fails and you think it is not working.
• Once you start searching, the view is too cluttered, you only see a tiny code window. Maybe most of the left hand section should be a drop down or pop up or something.
• When you update the index, it rebuilds the entire index. If you actually have a few hundred thousand files, that can take a while. It would be nice to only update an existing index. But I guess you dont need to run it all the time and could schedule it. But tools like the Wilbur I mentioned update an index file very quickly.