Indexed full text search in Eclipse?

Question

Is it possible (via a plugin or other way) for Eclipse to build a full text index for a project, so that searching a String does not linearly search all the files in the project?

(or does it automatically build such an index to speed up future searches?)

Answer 1

http://code.inf.unibz.it/projects/instasearch/ (old)

Edit: https://github.com/ajermakovics/eclipse-instasearch

It's a plugin that does indexed search using Lucene. Exactly what you're looking for I think.

Answer 2

The index files used by the search component of Eclipse (like a SearchParticipant) are in your workspace:

.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.jdt.core

As mentioned in this thread,

These files are used by the search or some other tools in Eclipse.
If you remove them, they will created again when you restart Eclipse or when you will activate the indexes. Then you will see a progress bar saying the number of files that need to be indexed.