I found this tool the other day while reading a post on Lifehack.org titled Top 20 Free Applications to Increase your Productivity. Top ## lists seem to be all the rage these days, but you probably won’t see a lot of them here at It’s Not The Network because there are just too many lists out there already. Instead, I will try to highlight a few really great applications for you and tip you off to those, so you don’t have to dig through each and every Top list to make the determination for yourself about what is good and what is fluff (although the ones at Lifehack are usually pretty good).
Anyway, back to the tool: ReplacEm is a great tool for Windows that allows you to find and replace text in multiple files simultaneously. While this might not seem like a big deal to some, once you realize you need it, you will be really glad to know about it. The first thing I did it was to replace the old Google Analytics tracker code in about 50 different files on another website that I help manage. This was something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but I just never got around to looking up the proper syntax to use sed to replace the right string on the FreeBSD server the files live on (and of course for testing and debugging the replacement over and over again until I refined my syntax to the point where it actually worked for replacing a multi-line string). Instead I simply copied the files to my Windows machine, used ReplacEm, verified that the change was what I wanted, and copied them back. What was going to take me around 30 minutes took about 5, once I had the right tool. Later this month I’ll do a short tutorial on how to use this tool, but I wanted to start spreading the word now, cause this one can be a real time saver.
Have you ever been troubleshooting an issue with a piece of equipment and have the support person on the other end of the line say to you “just ftp that log file up here to us and we’ll figure out your problem right away”, but you know that ftp is blocked from your site? Well, there are a variety of options available to you, including: drive to the local Starbucks (or other local hotspot) and use their Wi-Fi connection, email the log to him (oops, it is too big!), put it on your site and tell him to download it from you, burn it to CD and snail mail it to them (HA!), and more; but none of these are really optimal solutions. Today one of our support engineers reminded me that this is a common problem, and that there are some really great tools out there for solving it. The one she suggested is website called 