How to Search Through a WordPress Plugin’s Files with Sublime Text

One of the hardest things about debugging or extending WordPress plugins is often simply finding where a piece of code lives. A plugin may have many thousands of lines of code across dozens of PHP files, organized however the plugin developers thought made sense to them.

There’s an easy way to search through a plugin’s contents using Sublime Text. This video Quick Guide shows you how.

Here’s a text summary:

How to Search a WordPress Plugin’s Contents with Sublime Text

1. Get the plugin’s contents onto your local computer with FTP or by another method.
2. In Sublime Text, go to “File > Open Recent,” navigate to the plugin folder, and open it.
3. In the new Sublime Text window that opens up, right-click on the folder and choose “Find in Folder…”
4. Enter your search term to get all instances of that text in the plugin.

Although this guide is for Sublime Text, the process should be almost identical for any decent text editor. Give it a try!