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Finding and Replacing Text

The Search menu contains a number of commands for finding and replacing text.

The Find... and Replace... commands present dialogs for entering text for searching and replacing. These dialogs also allow you to choose whether you want the search to be sensitive to upper and lower case, or whether to use the standard Unix pattern matching characters (regular expressions). Searches begin at the current text insertion position.

Find Again and Replace Again repeat the last find or replace command without prompting for search strings. To selectively replace text, use the two commands in combination: Find Again, then Replace Again if the highlighted string should be replaced, or Find Again again to go to the next string.

Find Selection searches for the text contained in the current primary selection (see Selecting Text). The selected text does not have to be in the current editor window, it may even be in another program. For example, if the word dog appears somewhere in a window on your screen, and you want to find it in the file you are editing, select the word dog by dragging the mouse across it, switch to your NEdit window and choose Find Selection from the Search menu.

Find Incremental is yet another variation on searching, where every character typed triggers a new search. Incremental searching is generally the quickest way to find something in a file, because it gives you the immediate feedback of seeing how your search is progressing, so you never need to type more than the minimally sufficient search string to reach your target.

Searching Backwards

Holding down the shift key while choosing any of the search or replace commands from the menu (or using the keyboard shortcut), will search in the reverse direction. Users who have set the search direction using the buttons in the search dialog, may find it a bit confusing that Find Again and Replace Again don't continue in the same direction as the original search (for experienced users, consistency of the direction implied by the shift key is more important).

Selective Replacement

To replace only some occurrences of a string within a file, choose Replace... from the Search menu, enter the string to search for and the string to substitute, and finish by pressing the Find button. When the first occurrence is highlighted, use either Replace Again (^T) to replace it, or Find Again (^G) to move to the next occurrence without replacing it, and continue in such a manner through all occurrences of interest.

To replace all occurrences of a string within some range of text, select the range (see Selecting Text), choose Replace... from the Search menu, type the string to search for and the string to substitute, and press the "R. in Selection" button in the dialog. Note that selecting text in the Replace... dialog will unselect the text in the window.

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