[How-To] Searching history

Question

Recently a teammate said to me, “We used to use the phrase XYZ, but deleted it at some point. Do you know where we used it, and when we deleted it?”

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to do such a search inside of Paratext. Please correct me if I’m wrong–I’d love to know how to!

After a bit of trial and error, I was able to figure out how to do it externally using the hg Mercurial tools. From the root of the project folder, run the command
hg grep --all -I '*.SFM' 'XYZ'

Where --all means “search all of the revisions”, -I '*.SFM' means “only look in the files with .SFM endings”, and your search term is XYZ.

If XYZ is ascii, I was able to get the search to work in Windows. To search for unicode the only way I could get it to work was to run the tool inside of Linux.