Emacs: Search Text in Directory

Find Text in a Directory (no need grep)

Emacs: Xah Find Replace (xah-find.el)

Find Text in a Directory (need grep)

Alt+x grep

List all matching text of all files in the current directory. (Emacs grep command calls the unix grep command. On Microsoft Windows, you need to install it.)
The current directory is usually the folder the current opend file is in. You can first call dired to a folder you want.
It will prompt you like this: grep --color -nH -e ▮. For example, if you give this input grep -nH -e "Cheshire" *html. If you want case insensitive search, add a -i in the grep option.

Find Text in Nested Directories (need grep)

Find text in directory and all subdirectories, you can call any of:

Alt+x rgrep

Search all files in current directory and subdirectory.

Alt+x lgrep

Search only some files of current dir by using a regex on file names first.

Alt+x grep-find

Use a combination of unix grep and find commands. Example prompt: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -e grep -nH -e MySearchStr▮. (the exact prompt depends on your OS.)

Search Text from Dired (need grep)

Alt+x dired-do-find-regexp

Find all matches for REGEXP in marked files or the file under cursor. Requires the unix command find, xargs, grep.

Show Matched Files in Dired (need grep)

Alt+x find-dired

Run unix find command to list files and show them in dired. [see Emacs: File Manager, dired]