Simply by scrolling around in and browsing on words found in a file, you can do a tremendous amount of useful work. But Free Text Browser can do a lot more! In particular, when files get big, it may become tedious to scan over dozens or hundreds of instances of a word in order to find the few that are really important. Proximity search can help you do that, by restricting the displayed Context View lines to those which are in your "neighborhood of interest", a subset of the whole database.
Proximity search is easy and intuitive in Free Text. Begin by clicking on one of the empty boxes at the top center of the display. That click will create an empty subset of the database, a ΓÇÿtabula rasaΓÇÖ, which you will then begin to fill by shift-clicks on words of your choice. In the following example card, I shift-clicked on the words "FREE" and then on "FREEDOM". Look at the result. The first Index View has changed to show that 100% of the instances of ΓÇ£FREEΓÇ¥ are in my subset of interest, but 0 out of 2 instances of ΓÇ£FREEDOMSΓÇ¥ are included. The auxiliary window at the bottom right shows a summary of my clicks, in the form of a Boolean expression.
