Type some letters (typically a word or two) into the edit box at the top of
AnagramSearch's window, click the Go button or press the Return key, and a
list of words/phrases made from the letters will appear. The edit box
will accept up to 50 letters and 20 spaces
only. Entered spaces are ignored when forming anagrams.
When AnagramSearch is processing a request the Go button's label will change to Stop.
Clicking Stop will stop the search and display the results up to that point.
Double-click a result in the anagram list to copy it to the clipboard, or
use menu item Edit→Copy or key combination Command+C.
To select all anagrams right-click the list and click Select All.
The Minimum Word Length spinner sets the minimum
length of each candidate word. That prevents very short words from cluttering
the list and shortens the run time. If too many anagrams would result
AnagramSearch will silently increase the minimum word length to prevent long run times
potentially with millions of anagrams.
Radio buttons allow the selection of a small, large or personal word list. Words in the selected list are used as candidate words in the anagram search. The small word list contains about 10,700 words. The large one contains about 38,000 words. Right-click the bottom radio button or double-click it to open a personal word list. See heading Personal Word Lists below for more information.
AnagramSearch displays a total count of anagrams found,
along with the time taken to find them. Only the first 100,000
anagrams are placed in the output list. More anagrams would make the list slow
to respond. (See Saving a Complete Anagram List below for
how to see a complete, unexpurgated list of anagrams.)
To select a font for AnagramSearch to use, click menu item
Edit→Change Font... and select an application-wide font
family, style, weight and point size. Your selection will be retained across
AnagramSearch runs.
To save a file containing a complete list of the anagrams generated when the
Go button is clicked or the Return key is pressed, first
click menu item File→Save Anagrams to /Users/<your user name>/AnagramSearch.txt so it
is checkmarked. The file is not limited to the maximum of
100,000 anagrams.
The file is overwritten each time Go is clicked or Return is pressed.
Menu item File→Open Personal Word List... will open a
word list that is external to AnagramSearch, as will Right-clicking the bottom radio
button or double-click it.
The word list must contain text with
one candidate word per line. Any line containing characters other than letters
is ignored. AnagramSearch ignores letter case distinctions in word lists.
AnagramSearch can open txt, xz, gzip and bzip2 wordlist files containing text, with
names ending in .txt, .xz, .gz,
.bz2, or any text file name at all. Opening a file that is not
a text file and not a gz/xz/bz2-compressed text file is not supported.
A maximum of 100,000 words is accepted in a personal word list. Allowing more would slow AnagramSearch unduly. AnagramSearch will ask if a file with too many words should be truncated to its 100,000 shortest words. If not, the Open will be abandoned. Short English words are more common in text than long ones. In any case, files larger than 20,000,000 bytes will not be accepted for a personal word list.
Edit→Clear History.
Log File
If an error occurs it is logged in file
"/Users/<your user name>/AnagramSearch.log".
Uninstalling AnagramSearch
To uninstall AnagramSearch click menu item Help→Uninstall AnagramSearch...
and answer two questions.