AppIcon picture

Find (and Replace)

trueNext2 picture

The primary interface for performing a find is the Find dialog, summoned by choosing Edit > Find > Find. At the same time, much of what you can do in the Find dialog you can do using menu commands that have keyboard shortcuts, so with a little practice you can also perform a find efficiently without ever summoning the Find dialog at all.

The Find dialog is standard, and should need little explanation. Here are the usual basic steps for performing a find:

  1. Summon the Find dialog (⌘-F).

    As we shall see, if you don’t want to do a find-and-replace, this step can be omitted.

  2. Type or paste into the Find field the text you want to look for.

    Or, without summoning the Find dialog, locate or type the desired text in your outline, select it, and choose Edit > Find > Use Selection for Find (⌘-E). This copies the selected text directly into the Find field of the Find dialog (and if you were to open the Find dialog, you would see it there).

  3. Look forwards or backwards through the outline for the next or previous occurrence of the text that’s in the Find field. To do so:

To perform a find-and-replace, you will need to summon the Find dialog. Then:

  1. Enter the text to find in the Find field.

  2. Enter the text to replace it with in the Replace field.

  3. Now perform a find, so that the desired text is selected in the outline. Then:

Actually, clicking Replace will replace whatever is selected with what’s in the Replace field; it needn’t be an instance of the Find text.

The act of finding looks through the entire outline, not merely the part of the outline that happens to be expanded. When you perform a find, your collapsed topics will automatically expand as necessary; there is no need to do an Expand All first. At the same time, if you are in a restricted view — a focused view, or a filtered view — the find is restricted to topics that are present within that view. Both of these behaviors are what you would expect.



 
  Search (and Filtered View)
DWnext picture