Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

After discovering that Nutshell's Ferret search tool was 'crippled' to only work for 20 searches I was quite prepared to take a dislike to it. In fact, this utility is genuinely useful and it will take most people a good week or two to exhaust the 20 shots in real life, so I found myself being gradually won over. I've been looking at v1.1.

Although Ferret's file functions are far more restricted than those of JB5Utils, what it does do is done in much greater depth. Each search can be for either part of a filename or a text string to be located inside files on any disk or folder tree. Wildcards are allowed (* and ?, in the usual combinations) and there are wonderfully comprehensive advanced search options. Once you know what you're doing, a query such as "Help, I need to find a spreadsheet I was working on 2 weeks ago that has the word "Forecast" in it..." can be easily answered.

Ferret is true to its claims in that it's very fast. Scanning for a filename fragment across 40Mb of Psion disk space took only 15 seconds and scanning for a text string within each one of 4Mb of files on my internal drive took 20 seconds. Search matches can be sorted in several different ways within Ferret's professional interface and recognised file types are launchable by double-tapping on the search list. Agenda files get special treatment with a very handy viewer for agenda entries that match your search string.

The first time Ferret is run it takes 15 seconds or so to get initialised, but thereafter start-up time is fine. One thing I had hoped for was a way of viewing the contents of non-document files, perhaps adding a hexadecimal viewer could be next on Nutshell's to-do list?

All in all, a powerful search tool for the forgetful Psioneer.

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