15-Minute Reviews :: RQ Search and Replace v1.82

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is RQ Search and Replace version 1.82 by MiraSoftware – An application to search and replace text within documents.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“RQ Search and Replace is the text replacement software utility for Windows.

You can find and replace (multi-line) text bloks, whole words, ‘enclosed blocks’ in text files, in MS Word documents, delete tags and/or text in tags, add, delete or change tag attributes in HTML files.

The search and replacement patterns are stored in the special string table, so you can replace many patterns in numbers of files by ‘one click’. You can drag-n-drop patterns from the built-in editor to the string grid. The string grid can store multiline patterns. Powerful backup manager provides safety of all replacement operations.”

Quick Pros

• Folder-based batch functionality useful
• Advanced features have some usefulness
• Limited backup functionality useful to prevent mistakes

Quick Cons

• Mediocre interface layout – Looks and feels dated
• Lack of uniformity in font – Awkward reading
• No apparent word-wrap on text editor window
• Only help available is quick start document
• Not a lot of advanced search and replace functionality

Expansion

Upon your first launch of the application, you’re greeted by the main window. Within this main window is an assortment of areas. Down the right side of the window is the file control area, where you choose which folder you want to run in, the file mask and subdirectories as well as the list of files that will be worked on in the search. To the left of this area is a button bar, search controls (Including a table-style layout to display all the current search parameters set up and two text boxes for editing the search and replace terms), an area in which you can edit the files, and finally a status area. While the application is fairly straightforward to figure out for the most part, the interface looks dated and makes the whole process feel uncomfortable. They gray background box of the search parameters means you’ll be looking a bit longer at that, and some features are just awkward. The fonts were a large factor in this; There is no uniformity in font usage, and makes readability terrible. There is a Fonts and colors which you will definitely want to use to fix the top table’s color as well as the fonts, but this still does not fix the mismatched fonts in the ‘Find What’ and the ‘Replace With’ boxes.

The actual search and replace functionality is quite useful (Albeit no regexp functionality). The way this application handles files is on a directory basis; Anything that matches the file mask in the directory will be affected. While this is powerful, it could be restrictive as well; There is no way to select and deselect files you don’t want included. There are capabilities for limited tag replacement for HTML (Including handling the contents between tags), and more functions for Word document handling than raw text as well. There are little hidden gems around the application, such as the ability to rapidly change the case of selected text or paste it to a search/replace term box. There is even a few conversion and editing options under Operations as well.

The application is lacking readily available word wrap on the text editor; If you don’t have a fixed-width text document, you may be doing a lot of scrolling. During the search for word-wrap, found was the lack of the Help – Help (English) document. When you click on the menu item, nothing happens at all. There is only the quick help file, which is useful but not a full write-up on the program.

Final Verdict

While the application does some of what is expected from an application like this, its visual design, layout and controls brings the usability and ease-of-use down significantly. For free, I would likely suggest looking around for another title that might be more in-line with what you are looking for. As for paying $21 for this title, I would definitely want some maturing to this application before I could recommend it or purchase it myself. There are plenty of alternatives out there available. ReplaceEm is a freeware alternative which offers options such as regexp and further file controls.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, January 29, 2008