Find and Replace

Find and replace

Ctrl+F opens the find bar. It takes the caret; typing goes into the search box, not into your document.

In this document

Type, and the first match is found, scrolled to and counted -- the bar tells you how many there are. Find Next steps between them without changing the document.

That last clause is worth stating because it was once false. Pressing Enter twice in the find box used to replace the match with a line break, and the cause was a comment asserting that Find Next, Go to Line and a cross-file result were "each a single deliberate jump the user makes once" -- three claims, one of them true. It is fixed, and ADR-0052 is the record, because the shape of the mistake is more useful than the fix.

Replace and Replace All work on the current document. Replace All is a single undo entry, so Ctrl+Z puts every one of them back at once.

Across a folder

The find bar has In Folder..., which opens a folder picker and searches every document beneath it.

Results appear in a panel. Clicking a row opens that document, scrolls to the match and highlights it -- including when the row is below the fold, which is the case that used to be broken.

Cross-file search reads files. It does not modify them, and there is no replace-across-files. Changing many files at once with no way to see what happened is the kind of operation that needs a preview and an undo bigger than this product has, so it is not offered rather than offered badly.

Go to line

Ctrl+G, a number, Enter. The line is scrolled to and highlighted.

It works in both editor surfaces. It was marked as needing the custom surface for a long time and did not: moving the caret is something the toolkit's widget will do perfectly well, and only reporting where the caret is is the thing it refuses.

From the command line:

bpad --line 427 server.log

which does exactly what Ctrl+G does, using the same code path.

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