Finding and Replacing Text in the Editor

The Edit main menu and the editor right-click menu contain two choices for finding text: Find and Find with Dialog.

Find displays a Quick Find field where you can type text to look for, and use the Up and Down keys (and F3 and Shift-F3, by default) to find the next or previous occurrence. Use the Escape key to close the field.

Find with Dialog shows a dialog where you can enter what to look for, either as text or as a regular expression. You can also limit the search to the current selection and use other options for a more precise search. You can use Find Next and Find Previous to navigate to other matches, by default mapped to the F3 and Shift-F3 keys.

Use the Replace menu choice to show a dialog identical to Find with Dialog but with an additional field for entering then replacement text. When you use a regular expression with group expressions in the Find what field, you can use back references to the captured text in the Replace with field. The back reference is written as the dollar sign plus the group number. For instance, to replace all occurrences of the words COL1 and COL2 with the same word plus the character A (COL1A and COL2A) in a text, you specify the regular expression as a group, i.e. (COL1|COL2), and use a back reference for the first group in the replacement text plus the additional character A, i.e. $1A.