Helm - can it search within files?

I just started using Helm, so I imagine this is a common question to which I am not able to find an answer...yes I've heard of google ;-) I'd like to use Helm to search through my org-roam notes for a keyword...not just the titles, but the content in the files/notes for all notes in the roam directory. I have seen helm-occur and it looks great, but from what I've seen it only works on open buffers. So what I'm looking for is helm-occur results for all files in a specified directory. I got this working on Dired...well someone else did and yes, I copied it. I'm hoping to replicate the same functionality with Helm... Thanks for any pointers!

https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/wiki/Grep I would also recommend reading https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/

I use [https://github.com/emacsorphanage/helm-ag](https://github.com/emacsorphanage/helm-ag) because searches the contents for all files in a directory. That uses ag, the siver searcher which is a variant of grep (which is a shell utility that searches file contents)

Thank you both for the starting points...I got the regular grep using silver surfer to work, but haven't tried the helm-ag package yet. I'll give it a go this evening. What's the difference between the two? They both seem to use the silver surfer search utility...

I think helm has everything build in, no need for an extra package. If you really want to use something extra then there is also helm-rg. Ripgrep (rg) is in general the fastest way to search files.

I'm just a beginner, so take this with a grain of salt, but I heard that Helm not being supported anymore. It had one developer who got overwhelmed with the project. So the future of Helm is uncertain.

You should not spread rumors. It would take you 5 seconds to look at the Helm repo and see that it remains under active development by its author: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

Oh that's great news. Thanks for the clarification.