Windows Desktop Search for Mel
When customizing the Maya interface alot of the difficulty is in trying to find which of Mayas files you actually need to alter. this involves lots of scanning the scipt output to try and find command names, and ‘whatIs’ commands to get the mel files to look at. quite often you know the name of the command but you want to find out all the places that call it, and the only way to do this is to search the contents of all the mel scripts in the Maya directory. With a small tweak Windows desktop search (and probably google desktop and others) can index the contents of Mel files, and make searching them very quick and easy.
The options for windows desktop search are in Control Panel -> Indexing Options. You need to add the Maya directory to the list of folders to index. By default it won’t index the contents of Mel files, so you also need to tell it to consider these are plain text files; in the Indexing Options window, click Advanced, and go to the File Types tab. Search the list for the mel type, or you may need to add it if it’s not there, and set it to ‘Index Properties and File Contents’.
It will take a little while to index all the new files, but once done you can search the contents of Mayas mel files instantly.