Windows only We've seen all kinds of apps that assist with finding large files and folders on your machine, but you often don't have much control over the kinds of files and folders that are returned.

Windows only Programs like Notepad++ are great because they provide powerful text file editing, but the searching can leave something to be desired. Text Filter is an app dedicated to searching through text files and it does a great job of it. It instantly highlights results as you type, and can optionally hide lines that don't contain any matches.

Windows only We've covered several regular expression tools here on the site that make generating and testing your regex code easy, and today we've got a Windows app that does a bit more hand-holding. Expresso is a free (requires free registration) tool that has a built-in library of various expressions ready to be used, but also includes an Expression Builder for making your own.

We've posted all kinds of various regular expression builders (RegExr, Rejex, and ReguLazy) to help verify that the regex you're using will match the content it is running against. When you're just learning regular expressions those tools might be a little confusing, and so we thought we should offer up a couple free sites that should help out beginners.

I can't even begin to tell you how much I've used the free RegExr online regular expression tester in the past, but a comment on that article by Oliver pointed out another regex tester that I enjoy because of its sheer simplicity. The thing I wasn't always fond of with RegExr is that it's Flash-based and didn't work on mobile devices such as my iPad.

We have covered all kinds of bulk file renaming tools here, but the free RegexRenamer is one of my new favorites. As you can see in the screenshot above it has a very clean interface, but that is largely because it relies on you understanding how regular expressions (a.k.a. regex) work.

I always find myself using regular expressions (a.k.a. regex) in my programming because they are often the best way to parse out bits and pieces from blocks of text. Ever since I discovered the online RegExr that has been my tool of choice, but sometimes it's nice to have a dedicated application. Programs like RegexBuddy are awesome, but aren't free.