Search and replace

You can start searching text by pressing C-s or Edit→Search. During a search, the “search string” is displayed at the left hand side of the footer. Each character you type is appended to this search string and the next occurrence of it is surrounded by a red box. When pressing C-s a second time during a search, the next occurrence is being searched. A beep indicates that no more occurrences were found in the document; pressing C-s will continue the search at the beginning of your document. You may press backspace in order to undo key presses during a search.

Usually, text is being searched for in a forward manner, starting from the current cursor position. You may also search backwards, using C-r. During a search, only text in the same mode and the same language will be found, as those which are active at the position where you started your search. In other words, when searching an x in math-mode, you will not find any x's in the ordinary text. As a current limitation, the search string can only contain ordinary text and no math-symbols or more complicated structured text.

A query replace is started by pressing C-= or Edit→Replace. You are prompted for a string which is to be replaced and the string by which to replace. At each occurrence of the string to be replaced you are prompted and you have to choose between replacing the string (y), not replacing it (n) and replace this and all further occurrences (a). Like in the case of searching, the query-replace command is mode and language sensitive.

The current search and replace system is still quite rudimentary in the sense that it only deals with plain text in a simple way. In the future, we plan to implement a more powerful search and replace mechanism for structured text.

For the time being, you may nevertheless search and replace arbitrary document fragments as follows: somewhere inside your document or another window, select the fragment you want to search using Edit→Copy to→Search. Next hit C-s twice or more in order to search all occurences of this fragment inside your document. Similarly, using Edit→Copy to→Replace, you may select a second fragment by which you want to replace the first one. In order to start the replacement, hit C-= and specify the empty string as the arguments for “Replace” and “Replace by”.