View Menu

The View menu is part of the Main window

View | Common Tasks

This command shows/hides the Common Tasks panel. This panel displays all major FAR commands.


View | Find & Replace Panel

Show / Hide the basic Find and replace control panel.

Enter Text to Find.
Uncheck the Replace checkbox to find only.
Click Start to begin searching all files in the file list.
Click Stop or press Esc to stop searching.

Prompt Mode:    Preview each match found. Ask replace Y/N etc.
Ignore Case:       When checked, a search for say "Boy" will match "BOY" and "boY".
Ignore CR LF:    Html often breaks lines at spaces.  Check this option to ignore line breaks.
Ignore Multiple Spaces: Html code containing multiple spaces can be difficult to find. Check this option to treat all multiple spaces as a single space.
Search All Files:    Uncheck this option to search only the selected files.


General Search Tips:
  • Press ESC at anytime to terminate a find and replace run.
  • Far Find & Replace can also be operated in batch mode from the command line.
  • MS FrontPage HTML tab does not always show you the true document source code. So when you are swearing at FAR remember you may have copied FP text not the true source.
  • Normally for HTML file searching we leave all option checkboxes (right) checked. The exception is if we are searching for CR & LF characters (see below),  then "Ignore CR LF" and "Ignore Multiple Spaces"should be Unchecked.
  • Speed Up Tip: If you have thousands of files to process, use Windows Find to get a short list then drop the short list onto FAR. Windows Find is exceptionally fast (Although don't trust Win XP search).
  • Click the icon on the Find and Replace panel (main window) to access the Advanced Search dialog.
  • If the special character string "$F$" is found in a find or replace entry field then during Find and Replace $F$ will be replaced by the name of the current file being searched (filename only, no directory).
  • If the special character string "$#nn$" is found in a find or replace entry field then during Find and Replace $#nnn$ will be replaced by the char representation of nnn.
    EG. Find or Replace a CR char by using the string "$#13$"
    EG. Find or Replace a LF char by using the string "$#10$"
    EG. Find or Replace a Tab char by using the string "$#09$"
  • FAR supports the wild character "?". This will match any character. To search for a real "?" in a string prefix with the "^" char. EG. Find: "abc?" will match "abcd" of file string "abcd abc?", while Find: "abc^?" will match the "abc?" part.

See also: Advanced Find & Replace  (Commands menu)

View | Drop File Filter Panel

Allows you to quickly view what the current drop file filters are. Click the panel titles or the icon to open the Drop File Filter dialog  and modify the filters.

See Drop File Filters dialog


View | File Utilities Toolbar

Show the toolbar containing the File Utility commands.

View | Authoring Toolbar

Show the toolbar containing the Authoring commands.

View | Both Toolbars

Show both the File Utilities and Authoring toolbars together, and hide the page tabs.


View | Toolbar

Hide / Show the tool bar.

View | Toolbar Text

Hide / Show the tool bar text.

View | Show Full Directory Path

FAR file list "In Folder" column display mode. When checked the file list displays the fully qualified directory path. When unchecked the file list displays the relative path (relative to the base directory displayed in the title bar, screen top).

View | Show File Encoding Column

Hide / Show the "Encoding" column in the FAR file list. FAR reads the first few bytes of each file to determine the file's encoding. This can mean that scrolling a large file list is slow, so this feature is turned off by default.

You will typically see values like: ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-16 BE. The default (if not a binary file or UNICODE) is ANSI.

For the common binary files (.avi .bmp .chm .dll .dcu .exe .fla .gif .ico .jpg .pdf .png .res .wmv .wma .zip .dcu) FAR displays a blank, since encoding is irrelevant for binary file types. A blank is also displayed if the file does not exist or has no file extension.

You can extend the list of file types that FAR considers binary. To do this open the Settings.ini file (in the FAR.exe folder). For example to add .cache and .resx:
[MAIN]
EncodingColumnExtSkip='.cache.resx'    <-- Must be lowercase characters and contain no spaces

UTF-16 is also know as 'UTF-16 LE', 'UNICODE' or 'UNICODE little endian' and is typically used with MS Windows.
Mac UNICODE files typically have their byte pairs reversed in order, and are called 'UTF-16 BE' or 'UNICODE big endian'.

Older UNICODE files may not have a UNICODE signature (first few bytes of a file), so these are difficult to detect. FAR will typically check if every second byte is a null for the first 16 bytes, and assume a UNICODE file, otherwise it just defaults to 'ANSI'.