WinFindr is a fast and lightweight app to easily search for files, folders and also Windows registry data with multiple search terms at the same time.
History
I have been involved with many things about the Windows operating system. Back in the 1990’s, I made a registry cleaner app called RegCleaner which evolved to become a Windows utility suite called jv16 PowerTools.
During the development of jv16 PowerTools, every now and again I’d use Windows Registry Editor to look for registries, and it was always so clunky to use. And if I need to search for files, I’d need to use a separate third-party app because Windows Explorer is always so slow and inaccurate.
Naturally, I’d research the existing Windows search apps in the market to see if there’s a tool that allows me to easily search for files AND registry. There was no such thing available, which bewildered me.
Another annoying thing that I encountered in those search apps is the awkward user experience. They tend to be either too complicated like an airplane cockpit or too simple and lacking in features and functionality.
Then it dawned on me that I should make a tool that solves all of the above problems. Surely I am not the only one who’s very annoyed with the existing choices.
Long story short, I created WinFindr as an answer to my annoyance. My goal with WinFindr is to create an easy-to-use app that allows me to search for files and registry. I also sprinkled in extra features such as searching multiple terms at the same time and searching based on file content as a bonus, because why settle with good if you can make it great.
Key Features of WinFindr
WinFindr has a lot of nifty features such as:
- Search for files, folders, registry keys and registry entries, all at the same time.
- Supports searching with normal search words, file masks (wildcards) and regular expressions, all at the same time, too!
- Also supports negative search terms, allowing you to skip any data.
- Search for data inside text files, inside Microsoft Word Doc documents, OpenOffice Odt documents and inside text-based PDF files.
- Search for data inside epub ebook files.
- Search for files inside Zip and Rar archives.
- Search for files based on their size.
- Search for files based on their metadata. For example, if your mp3 music file collection includes the mp3 metadata, you can search for songs based on their album name and other metadata. The metadata support also includes searching for image files based on their metadata.
- Save search settings and perform the same search again in the future easily by just running the saved search.
- Proximity search. For example, search for files whose name (or content) includes search words “cute” and “cat” and both terms must be found at most, say, 6 words apart.
- Supports a natural search option to ignore special characters between words. For example, “cute cat” will match “cute-cat.jpg” and “cute_cat.png” and so on.
- Supports a natural search option to ignore accented characters. For example, a search term “cafe” will match “The best cafés in Braga.pdf”
- Supports a natural search option to ignore derived words and conjugations in English. For example, a search term “invoice” will match “Invoicing.pdf”
- All the natural search features and the proximity search can also be used to find files based on their content, including text files, Microsoft Word documents (doc and docx formats), as well as text-based PDF files.
- Save the found results as a report file in TXT, CSV or HTML file format.
- Supports Windows Dark Mode.
- Comes with these translations builtin: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
- Has a portable version that consists of a single executable file. That means you can just copy one file to any Windows PC to search data there. No installation. No uninstallation. Just copy and go.
- WinFindr is freeware, lightweight and easy to use. No bells and whistles, no nonsense.
So, what do you think?
If this is the first time you have heard about WinFindr, my question to you is simple:
Would you like to give it a try?
I hope you choose to download WinFindr to give it a try! I’m confident you will like it! And if you don’t, please let me know and I will do my best to make it better for you. I really mean that.
And if you do give it a try and happen to love it, there is a Pro version of WinFindr available. If you could consider supporting the development of this program by buying the Pro version, that would mean a lot to me. WinFindr Pro comes with access to dedicated technical support as well as some additional Pro features, such as the support for command line parameters.
Best Regards,
Jouni Flemming