![]() To start an (incremental) regular expression search, just press Ctrl-Meta-s or Ctrl-Meta-r instead of Ctrl-s and Ctrl-r. You can match single- and multi-character wildcards, ranges of characters, empty strings, and newlines, all according to the standard regular expression syntax. The most powerful searching tool in Emacs is a regular expression search. ![]() So the word search Ctrl-s Enter Ctrl-w DVD RW Enter would find both DVD-RW and DVD+RW. Then comes the difference - you type Ctrl-w, then the search string, then finally Enter. Starting a word search is much like starting a non-incremental search type Ctrl-s, then press Enter. It is useful when you’re editing formatted documents such as LaTeX files, or for when you need to find a string but you don’t know exactly what characters may be in or around it. Word search looks for matches to the specified string while ignoring such non-word interlopers like punctuation, whitespace, and formatting characters. To make a search case-sensitive, all you have to do is specify a capital letter in the search string.Įmacs also has several forms of advanced searching, such as word search and regular expression search. This applies to normal search functions, search-and-replace functions, and regular expression searches. Searches in Emacs are case-insensitive, so long as the search string is composed of lower-case letters only. To replace all matches without being asked for each one, press ! (the exclamation point). To perform the replacement, press y, or to skip it, press n. Here again, you are in an interactive mode - Emacs will find and highlight this first match, but you must give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down before it will move on. Immediately, Emacs will jump to the first match that it finds. So, for example, if you want to replace the word “Fry” with the word “Bender,” you would type Meta-% Fry Enter Bender Enter. To use it, press Meta-%, type the string you are looking for followed by Enter, then the replacement string, also followed by Enter. For this task, the best bet is what Emacs calls a query-replace. Sometimes you are searching for a string just to jump to a particular location in a file, but another common usage is to search for a string in order to replace it. To perform a non-incremental search going backward, you would type Ctrl-r Enter searchstring Enter. Now type the search string, and press Enter again. To perform a non-incremental search, just type Ctrl-s, then press Enter. You may wonder, then, if Emacs can operate in this mode. When you are not in the middle of a search, you can repeat the last search by typing Ctrl-s Ctrl-s - in a sense, simply starting over the last search you performed, and jumping to the “next match.” You can repeat other searches from earlier in the session by starting a search with Ctrl-s, then using Meta-n and Meta-p (for next and previous) to cycle through the search history.Įmacs is unique in its preference for incremental searching - most other editors make you type the entire search string before they begin looking for it. Doing this, you can cycle through all of the matches in your document. To leap to the next instance, just press Ctrl-s (or Ctrl-r) again. To search backwards instead, you would type Ctrl-r, and follow the exact same procedure.Īs either search finds matches for your string, it jumps the cursor to the position of that word - beginning with the first instance it sees. ![]() If you do mistype a character, just hit Backspace and re-type the correct one - Emacs will keep up with you as you make changes.Īs soon as you have found the word you are looking for, all you have to do is click in the active window to get back to your text editing the search ends automatically.Īs the name implies, isearch-forward searches forward from wherever the cursor is at the moment. As soon as you type Ctrl-s, you can begin typing the search string that you are looking for, and Emacs will search for it as you type, highlighting the first match.Įmacs might find the first match after just the first few characters - saving you keystrokes and freeing you from worry if you are looking for some complex, easily misspelled string. This launches isearch-forward, an incremental search. You start a basic search in Emacs by typing Ctrl-s. When that happens, you’ll be glad that Emacs has flexible, built-in search and replace commands to help you find exactly what you are looking for. Even if you use Emacs every day, sometimes you’ll misplace a word or phrase. ![]()
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