FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Philippe: There are two main objectives for the future releases of Find & Replace It!. The first one is to add support for lists of replacements' commands. Thus it would be possible to define a sequence of: find some expression, replace with another one. Each command of such a sequence will offer all the options available today for the searching/replacing texts within files . We just started to think about it, but we hope this can be done by the beginning of 2011, probably with a version 2.0. The second major objective is to provide the undo/redo for mass replacements in files. This would be a very nice feature if you have corrupted thousands of files due to a poorly defined regexp. Hopefully, this objective will be fulfilled with version 3 of Find & Replace It!

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for Find & Replace It? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Philippe: In September 2005, as software developers, we needed a tool to do some tricky replacements that our IDE did not handle. In the meantime, we were also looking for a tool that would allow us to previewing changes before doing them. We tried some well known text editors but none of them offered dynamic replacement. We mean we were looking for an expression composed of a fixed part, and a second part that varies. Of course the goal was to be able to search for the whole but replace without altering the varying part. Need an example? We had to update various copyrights within thousands of files : "[...] 2003-2005", "[...] 2004 - 2006", "[...] 2005-2008". Of course searching for only "200x" and replacing it by lets say "2010" would have corrupted our source code. Therefore we needed to search the first part of the copyright pattern but also to keep it intact. Find & Replace It! was born! Actually, the development started to be more professional in the second part of 2008. We have a few ideas for new developments but Find & Replace It! has the top priority for now. It will be improved continuously through regular releases.

FW Editor: It is true that Find & Replace It can handle huge text files (10 GB and more)?
Philippe: Yes, it can. However, that can be pretty slow if you have a standard harddrive. Indeed the software has to read the all these GB of data from your disk!

FW Editor: What makes Find & Replace It so unique? Why it is so powerful?
Philippe: The power of this utility software depends on what you're doing with it. Find & Replace It! does not promise to process your MS Office documents nor your PDF files. The only thing it does is to provide a high end solution for treating complex replacements inside plain text files. For instance, it allows you to finely tune the encoding used to read and write every file. By the way, people wanting to maintain documents in many languages, will appreciate the fact that the encoding is detected on the fly. Thus avoiding loosing some chars while replacing URLs in pages of a German website. For those who work on configuration files, XML or others, they will be delighted by the infinite possibilities offered by the scripting interface to transform the replacement text: doing arithmetic operations on found text, use the path or filename of the modified files, applying conditions and operations on the replacement string, manipulate dates, etc. It also offers all the necessary tools to quickly select the only files that must be processed instead of just asking for a folder containing the files supposed to be modified and a filename pattern to match against. Find & Replace It! is fast, and responsive. Actually it is fully multi-threaded, which means that when you are running a search, you might have three files inspected at a time, but you still have the control on your mouse to cancel the search. Finally, its preview feature is really powerful and helpful. You can visualize in one glance what are the texts who match a given expression, what will be the replacement text and even mix both views. It gives you an immediate feed-back on what is going to change which makes easy to understand the impact of your replacement within a file without actually modifying its content.

FW Editor: What are the advantages of using Find & Replace It over any other similar products?
Philippe: There is a lot of "search and replace" tools on the web, but not that much who care about text encoding and end-of-lines like Find & Replace It! does. This feature enables you to effectively maintain websites, whatever the language. The same apply to us when we have to work with some source code that mixes XML configuration files, several source code files and HTML documentation. All of them use a distinct text encoding. However, whenever we have something to rename, all files need to be updated. The competitors simply do not handle the encoding detection. In the same way, most of them don't like big files and might just hang if you try to handling a 2 GB file. It could be the only way to do some search and replace operations inside a very large log file. It is also the only software we've ever seen in this category, that offers a JavaScript interface to process the replacement text on the fly! Briefly, you can apply some script whenever the software replaces a piece of text somewhere in a file. The integrated regular expression editor is one of the best you can find. Same for the preview window. Finally, it is cross-platform. That is something pretty rare and very useful for developers.

FW Editor: Are you offering any special advantages for Find & Replace It users? I'm thinking at free customer support service, free updates and more.
Philippe: Any user that has a valid license is eligible for free support service. The license covers all minor updates (e.g.: all 1.x.y releases). Some major updates (e.g.: from 0.x to 1.x) might also be included.

FW Editor: How can you describe Find & Replace It in one single word? Why?
Philippe: It rocks! It has three major features that no competitor has. That's not so bad. Isn't it?

FW Editor: What is your favorite feature from Find & Replace It and why?
Philippe: The ability to dynamically transform the texts to be replaced is our favorite feature. This involves mixing all the classical possibilities of regular expressions with JavaScript programming. It is possible to look for very complex patterns with regular expressions. However a simple replacement by a static text is most of the time insufficient. Therefore, the scripting feature gives us all the power of JavaScript to format whatever we need and the regular expressions simply tell us where to apply the script.

FW Editor: Can you tell us more about this feature? Why it is so important? Is Find & Replace It the same without it?
Philippe: The best way to really understand why this feature is so important is probably to give some examples. For instance, imagine that you moved a websites into a new directory on your server. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to automatically update all references to file paths within files, according to their real location? And what would you think of inserting the size of each file somewhere in the file itself, of course with the format of your choice? Do you need to update some miscellaneous dates within some web pages by shifting them of one month? The scripting interface can bring solutions to all these kinds of problems. A couple of months ago, we were looking for a way to obfuscate the source code of a software. After a few search on the web we found a JavaScript example of the AES encryption algorithm. After a few tweaks, we were able to replace all the names of our functions with their cyphered version! Then, 3 minutes later we had the script for decrypting the source code. Hence, with such a feature, Find & Replace It! is a bit more than a search and replace software. So, it would not be the same without it.

FW Editor: Now, to end our small interview, is there any message you would like to send to Find & Replace It users?
Philippe: We'd like to invite every one to give it a try. We would be more that happy to hearing your feedback.