System Search - Finding Files Anywhere

Now that CDT 5.0 is out the door I'm starting to review some of the work the Carbide team has done over the past year and pick out things that might make good contributions to the next CDT release.

As we talk to C++ developers who have moved to our Eclipse based tools we occasionally ask them if they are working in Carbide all of the time or still need to their old IDE environment around. The old IDE is usually Visual Studio or CodeWarrior and we found that people were switching back so they could use them to search for and in a collection of files. C++ developers often need to work with files strewn all over the file system so the regular File Search in Eclipse, which only searches files in the workspace, doesn't do enough for them.

Of course there is a bug for this but we quickly came to the conclusion that we couldn't easily modify or extend standard File Search so we created a System Search that would let you look at files anywhere in the file system.


This should look pretty familiar except for the field at the bottom that lets you pick a location in the file system to search. The results are displayed in an adaptation of the standard search results view.

We've gotten a lot of very positive customer feedback but people have also been quick to ask for more features. There is also some more work we need to do before contributing this to CDT: a little more code cleanup is needed and more testing on multiple platforms.

If you want to play around with System Search the code is attached to the bug.