Discovery of Alpine's Text Search

[Howard Schwartz]

Hi all - thought to share my discovery that Alpine's ability to search
messages for text strings is not as bad as I had thought. Ordinarily, I
used astrogrep to search Pine's folders. But I was forced to use pine
recently and found: One can use the ; key usually employed to mark files
for copying, deleting, etc. One specifies marking folders whose text
match a certain string, and alpine searches all folders, or all folders
in a given collection for the string. It marks the folders that have the
text somewhere. Then you have to tunnel down: Now you use open each
possible folder, and use ; to mark messages that match the string. Third,
you can use the where key, w, to actually find the string in each
message.

The problem with all this, is you are flying blind for the first 2
stages: Alpine marks things but gives no info. about what is in them and
where.

I find Astro grep and vim to be easier for a text search: Astrogrep is
freeware and does require the net framework, version 2 or later. It will
search all folders for a string or regular expressions, and display each
found string, with up to 10 lines of context. One can then click on any
line with the string to open an editor with that file, on that line.

This locates the message you are looking for a lot quicker.