Can Notepad++ Find Files by Name on My Hard Drive - Not Just Content of Files?

[Jerry Leventer]

SYSTEM
Notepad++ v5.9.3
Windows 7 Desktop

BACKGROUND
I’ve been using Notepad++ for several years, but never to its full potential. I only recently found the “Find in Files” search tool. However, because I am on a Windows 7 machine, I am always looking for a better search tool to find files on my hard drive.

QUESTION
So, I was wondering if Notepad++ has a feature that allows us to search on the hard drive for a file by name.

After searching on Google and in this forum for keyword phrases such as “Can Notepad++ find files by name,” I have not found any reference to this question having been answered. So I thought I would open the topic.

Thank you.

[Jim Dailey]

The plug-ins you will find here make it possible to open files in Notepad++ by name (or by path\name) that you have added to a “solution”. I have no idea what performance you could expect if you added an entire hard drive as a solution, however…

[Fisher Chen]

I would try cygwin + find.

[Tod Mar]

This would work if there was a regular expression that matched everything including LF once.

[Tod Mar]

^(.+)$
and check the box for ‘. matches newline’ (and regular expressions)
then each file shows 1 line in it.

[Scott Sumner]

@Tod-Mar

This works if you are really suffering for a way to do it and have no other. :-D

Maybe a better regex search would be for (?s)^.*. This avoids the need to be concerned about the state of the “. matches newline” checkbox.

Since the results that appear in the “Find result” panel are initially expanded, I found that right-clicking and performing a “Collapse All” followed by a left click of the “boxed plus sign” for the search gave the best view of only the matching filenames.

Note that this method will NOT find files that have zero-length. Nor will it find files that have no extension, see https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/13196/find-in-files-search-only-files-with-no-extension

Other alternatives, although not quite “within Notepad++” are discussed here:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/13210/search-for-files-by-extension

[Ethan Piliavin]

I would recommend you try the tool Everything by Voidtools.

Its not an NPP plugin but very configurable, extensive and can be setup to quickly find anything and open in NPP per your original request.

[Tod Mar]

-Now- what I need is a filename pattern to exclude, like a RexExp on the filename (not the extension or the folder).

[Claudia Frank]

@Tod-Mar

as far as I remember it only supports include patterns.

Cheers
Claudia