Tools to search for strings inside files without indexing [closed]

I'm a fan of the Find-In-Files dialog in Notepad++. Bonus: It's free.

There is also a Windows built-in program called findstr.exe with which you can search within files.

>findstr /s "provider=sqloledb" *.cs

Original Answer

Windows Grep does this really well.

Edit: Windows Grep is no longer being maintained or made available by the developer. An alternate download link is here: Windows Grep - alternate

Current Answer

Visual Studio Code has excellent search and replace capabilities across files. It is extremely fast, supports regex and live preview before replacement.

I like AstroGrep. The results are shown in a list. A click on a row shows you the whole line as a preview highlighting the hit. It seems to be quite fast, lean and it is free. Tested on Windows 7, 8, 10 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Allows regular expressions.

AstroGrep is a Microsoft Windows GUI File Searching (grep) utility. Its features include regular expressions, versatile printing options, stores most recent used paths and has a "context" feature which is very nice for looking at source code

Reference: AstroGrep