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Finding and replacing text

You can easily locate and change a word (or any set of characters) that you’ve used in a TextEdit document, even if it occurs many times throughout the document.

You can search for text in the whole document or a selected area of the document.

To find and replace text:

  1. Choose Edit > Find > Find, and then type the text you want to search for.

  2. If you want to replace found text with new text, type the new text in the “Replace with” field.

  3. Set up search options below the “Replace with” field:

    Ignore case: Select to ignore the capitalization of text when searching.

    Wrap around: Select to continue searching from the beginning of the document when you start the search somewhere within the document.

    Pop-up menu: Choose an option to indicate whether to find the specified text when it’s contained anywhere within words (Contains), only when it occurs at the beginning of words (Starts With), or only when it occurs as a complete word (Full Word).

  4. Click a button to find or replace text:

    • To find the next or previous occurrence of the text in the document without changing the current selection, click Next or Previous.

    • To replace the current selection of the text and immediately find the next occurrence, click Replace & Find.

    • To replace only the selected occurrence of the text, click Replace.

    • To replace all occurrences of the text in the document, click Replace All.

    • To replace all occurrences of the text in a block of selected text, hold down the Option key and click In Selection.

    • To select (but not replace) all occurrences of the text, hold down the Control key and click Select All.

    • To select (but not replace) all occurrences in a block of selected text, hold down both the Control key and the Option key and click In Selection.

You can also search for and select text that’s styled in a certain way (for example, all underlined words in Lucida Grande font).


Related Topics

finding