About find & replace
Find and replace changes every occurrence of a word or pattern in a block of text at once, with a live count of the matches.
Plain text or regular expressions
- Plain text matches exactly what you type.
- Regular expressions match patterns. For example \d+ matches any run of digits, and ^ and $ match the start and end of a line.
- In a pattern, brackets create groups that you can reuse in the replacement as $1, $2 and so on.
Case sensitivity and whole words
Turn case sensitivity on when capitals matter. To avoid changing part of a longer word, such as cat inside category, match the whole word with a pattern like \bcat\b.
Check the count first
The match count shows how many places will change. If the number is bigger than you expect, refine the search before replacing.
