November 20, 2009:

This plugin was written by Mike Doty <mike@psyguygames.com> and slightly modified by Vince Wadhwani <twitter.com/vwadhwani>. The original Find in Documents plugin is Copyright (C) 2007 Mike Doty. Parts of this code were also taken from the SnapOpen plugin which is Copyright (C) 2006 Mads Buus Jensen <online@buus.net>.

Limitations: It will only open the file from the sidepane if you have a file open. It uses the linux ack-grep or grep command to search subdirectories so it will take a long time depending on where you are.  If you develop rails and don't have ack-grep installed, I'd suggest you not search your entire Rails Root but rather just the app directory.

Requirements: Gedit (of course) and the File Browser Pane plugin must be enabled.  

Installation: Copy the files to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

Usage: In the sidepane, use the file browser plugin to open to the root of your application.  Click the FindinDocuments tab and enter a value to search by.  Click search and hopefully watch the results roll in

The earlier Find in Documents plugin required that you have the document open in gedit.  This version allows you to search within any document in the root of the filebrowser pane (given the above limitations) If the previous behavior is preferable, please see download the original plugin from http://www.psyguygames.com/FindInDocuments_plugin.tar.gz

Release notes:
 November 20, 2009
  1. Support for ack!  Ack is about 4x faster than grep for the purpose we need.  Make sure you have ack-grep installed (sudo apt-get install ack-grep).  This plugin will gracefully degrade to using grep if you don't have ack installed.  Note that the plugin expects ack-grep to work so if you are on a non-debian distribution you may have to create a symlink between ack-grep and your ack command. (ack is a kanji translation program in Debian/Ubuntu)

 June 26, 2009: 
 
  1. now supports special characters in search. e.g. You can now search for "<%= link_to" instead of just "link_to"
  2. ignore comments checkbox will also ignore lines that start with "<!--" and "/*" for html and css respectively

--Vince Wadhwani
twitter.com/vwadhwani