Drill Deeper into Jarrrrrs

Finding occurrences of a string or usages of a symbol across a project is a rather common task. However, it becomes less evident, if the goal of your search is hidden inside an archive. IntelliJ IDEA helps you easily drill into directories, libraries, zip or jar files.

Let’s consider two cases of search in archives:

• Finding a text string
• Finding usages of a symbol

After clicking the Find button, the detected occurrences are displayed in the Find tool window.

As for finding usages of a symbol inside library sources, you have to define a dedicated scope. For this purpose, IntelliJ IDEA suggests the Scopes dialog. You can construct scopes in advance (Ctrl+Alt+S ->Scopes), or do it immediately in the Find Usages dialog (Alt+F7). This is how it's done:

Having invoked the search for usages of a selected symbol, click the ellipsis button next to the Scope field:

In the Scopes dialog, create a new scope (for example, LibraryScope) and populate it with module directories and library archives. Note that library classes and sources should be already defined and attached in the project settings. Though you can type the scope pattern manually, it is much easier to select the desired entries from the list. For your convenience, you can group entries by modules, or by scope types:

As you include or exclude the desired archives and packages, IntelliJ IDEA constructs the corresponding scope pattern:

After applying changes and closing the Scopes dialog box, click the Find button, and view results in the Find tool window.

Enjoy!