This section describes items associated with searching and replacing. For more information about using search and replace operations, see Find and Replace.
The Search menu contains items pertaining to search and replace, navigation, and bookmarks.
|
Search Menu Item |
Description |
Command |
|---|---|---|
|
Push Bookmark |
Pushes a bookmark at the cursor. See Bookmarks. |
push_bookmark |
|
Pop Bookmark |
Pops the last bookmark. See Bookmarks. |
pop_bookmark |
|
Bookmark Stack |
Displays the Bookmark Stack tool window. See Bookmark Stack Dialog. |
pop_bookmark |
|
Set Bookmarks |
Sets a persistent bookmark on the current line. See Bookmarks. |
set_bookmark |
|
Go to Bookmark |
Displays the Go to Bookmark dialog from which you can select a bookmark to navigate to. See Navigating Named Bookmarks. |
goto_bookmark |
|
Toggle Bookmark |
Toggles setting a bookmark on the current line. See Bookmarks. |
toggle_bookmark |
This section describes the dialogs and views that are associated with searching and replacing. Note that default search options are also available (Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Editing → Search). See Search Options for a description of these settings.
This view is displayed when you click one of the find or replace items on the Search menu, or when you click Window → Show View → Other , then expand SlickEdit and select SlickEdit Search. See Find and Replace for information about searching and replacing in SlickEdit® Core.
The Find and Replace view contains a right-click context menu and four tabs: the Find Tab, the Find in Files Tab, the Replace Tab, and the Replace in Files Tab.
Right-click in the background of the Find and Replace view to access the following items:
Saved Search Expressions - See Saving Search and Replace Values.
Configure Options - Displays the Search Options screen, from which you can set the default search options that the view should use.
Use Default Options - If selected, the options specified in the Search Options are used instead of the options selected in the Find and Replace view. See Default Search Options.
Clear All Options - Clears all options that are selected in the Find and Replace view.
Set Current Options as Default - If selected, the options that are selected on the view replace the settings in the Search Options.
Hide/Show Tabs - Toggles the display of the tabs on the Find and Replace view.
Clear Highlights - Removes all highlighting from text that was highlighted during a search or replace operation.
This tab on the Find and Replace view provides fields and options for searching and finding text.
Search for - Enter the string you want to search for here. You can retrieve previous search strings by clicking the drop-down list button. Strings may be text or regular expressions and can include wildcards. Note that ISPF search expressions cannot be used here.
Click the right-pointing arrow button to the right of the Search for field to display a menu containing specific search syntax options such as Character in Range, Beginning of Line, and Decimal Digit.
Look in - This field allows you to specify a range for your search to the current selection, current procedure, current buffer or all buffers.
Search options - Click this button to expand or contract the search options section of the view. When contracted, the options that are selected are summarized in this area.
Match case - If selected, a case-sensitive search is performed.
Match whole word - If selected, a word search is performed. Before a search is considered successful, the characters to the left and right of the occurrence of the search string found are checked to be non-word characters.
The default word characters are [A-Za-z0-9_$] and can be changed. To change these, from the main menu click Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Languages → [Language Category] → [Language] → General. Enter your desired characters in the Word chars field.
Use - Set this option to select one of the following types of search syntax from the drop-down list:
Regular expression (UNIX)
Regular expression (Brief)
Regular expression (SlickEdit® Core)
Regular expression (Perl)
Wildcards (*,?)
See Using Regular Expressions in SlickEdit® for more information.
Color - Displays the Color Coding Search Preferences dialog. This dialog lets you pick various syntactic elements to filter a search. These are the same elements used by the Color Coding engine. Using these filters helps to reduce the number of false positives you find in a search. Each check box has three states:
Neutral (the default) - All check boxes start in the neutral state. These elements will be used in a search until cleared or until one or more other elements are selected. Putting a check in any check box essentially clears all non-checked boxes.
Selected - If the check box is selected, the search will be restricted to this element and any other selected elements. There is no need to clear any other elements if any elements are selected. If any elements are selected, only selected elements will be searched. For example, to search for the word "result" only in comments, put a check only in the Comment check box. All other syntactic elements will be ignored as part of this search.
Cleared - If the check box is clear, these elements will not be searched. For example, if you want to find the word "result" anywhere in your code except for in comments, clear the Comment check box.
Click the Reset button to mark all items as neutral.
Note
Not all languages have all color coding elements defined. For example, dBase and Pascal do not have preprocessing. Only C++ and Java have function color defined. Only HTML has attributes (i.e. <img src=.>).
Wrap at beginning/end - If selected, the search will always be performed on the entire buffer, starting from the cursor.
Place cursor at end - If selected, the cursor is placed at the end of the occurrence found.
Search backward - Select this option to have the search performed from the end to the beginning.
Search hidden text - Select this option to search for text hidden by Selective Display. Matches found that were set to be hidden by Selective Display will be revealed. To set Selective Display options, from the main menu click Display → Selective Display. See Selective Display for more information.
List all occurrences - Select this option to see a list of all instances of the search string in the file. The Find tab expands to show the Results options, where you can specify the output destination. These options are similar to the Results options on the Find in Files tab. See Find in Files Tab for more information.
Highlight matches - Select this option to highlight all matched patterns in the current search range. Highlight colors for these matches are customizable. To set this color, from the main menu, click Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Appearance → Colors and select Highlight from the Screen element list. Choose your desired color settings and click OK. See Colors for more information.
To clear all highlighted text in all buffers, clear the Highlight matches option or simply close the Find and Replace view.
Bookmark matches - Select this option to bookmark lines with matching patterns and display the Bookmarks view when a match is bookmarked.
Incremental search - Select this option to search incrementally on patterns being typed into the Search for field, showing the location of the match at the cursor. See Incremental Searching for more information on this method of searching.
Find button - Click this button when you have entered all desired search options and are ready to initiate a search. If no matches are found, the Search for field will turn red, and the text String not found will be displayed in the status area of the editor.
This tab on the Find and Replace View provides the same functionality as the Find Tab, with the added ability to conduct multi-file searches. Additional options are described below.
Look in - This field allows you to specify a range for your search to the current selection, current procedure, current buffer or all buffers.
Click the right-pointing arrow button to the right of the Look in field to display a menu containing more specific range options such as Directory, Project, and All Buffers. From this sub-menu, you may also select Append and choose an item for which to have the search results appended.
File types - Specifies one or more file types (extensions) to search for. Type in this field or use the drop-down list to select the extensions desired. When a file title is specified in the Look in field, the file types wildcards are ignored.
Exclude - Paths, files, or file types can be excluded from a multi-file search by specifying them with wildcards or full path names. To specify multiple patterns, separate them with semicolons. No files are searched in a path that is excluded, including any files in sub-directories beneath. See examples of exclude patterns, below.
Example
Description
*math*.cppExclude any
.cppwith "math" in the file name.readme.txtExclude all files named
readme.txt.*.aExclude any file with extension
.a.*.png;*.ico;*.jpgExclude any file with extension
.png,.ico, or.jpg.*\CVS\Exclude any files in paths named "CVS".
/home/build/debugExclude all files in this path name.
*demo*Exclude any file or path with "demo" in the name.
Look in subfolders - Select this option to expand the search to sub-directories of the folder specified in the Look in field.
Results options - Click this button to expand or contract the Results options section of the view. When contracted, the options that are set are summarized in this area.
Search Results window - This field allows you to send the search results to a specific Search Results window. The window to be used can be selected from the drop-down list, and these are labeled starting at Search<0>. A new results window can be added with the <New> option up to a pre-set limit of open Search Results windows. If <Auto Increment> is selected, the search results will cycle through all of the open Search Results tabs in the Search Results view with each new search. See Search Results Output for more information.
Right-click in the Search Results window to access the following options:
Quick Search - Finds the next occurrence of the text selected.
Filter Search Results - Select this option to display the Filter Search Results dialog. From here, if a match is found, you can choose to keep or delete lines with additional searches, match case, limit to current default regular expression syntax and/or remove matches found on the same line number in the same file (this can also be accomplished by selecting List matching lines only from the Find in Files tab).
Open as Editor window - Opens current search results in a new editor window.
Go to Line - Goes to the file/line number of the current line in the Search Results window.
Bookmark Line - Places a bookmark at the line in the file where the result was found.
Clear Window - Clears all results in the current Search Results window.
Align Columns - Aligns the line numbers and column numbers for all search results.
Collapse All - Collapses all Selective Display levels. See Selective Display for more information.
Expand All - Expands all Selective Display levels. See Selective Display for more information.
Output to editor window - If selected, search results are sent to an editor window.
Append to output - Select this option to append search results to the search results window that is in focus.
List matching lines once only - Selecting this option will display only one line in the search results window for each line containing one or more matching patterns on the same line, and will highlight all matching patterns.
List matches only - If selected, only the matching expression is displayed in search output, instead of the line the match occurs.
List filenames only - If selected, only file names and not occurrences are listed in the search output.
Foreground search - If selected, activates the three range options listed below. This option offers slightly better performance than a background search, but prevents you from continuing to work while the search is being performed. The default search for SlickEdit® Core is background searching unless this option is selected.
Prompted - When this option is selected, you are prompted whether to continue searching when an occurrence is found.
Single - When this option is selected, your cursor is placed on the first occurrence found, but the remaining files are not searched.
Global - When this option is selected, all files are searched for occurrences without prompting.
Stop button - Click Stop to terminate a multi-file, background search. Press Esc to terminate a long foreground search.
This tab on the Find and Replace View provides options for searching and replacing text. The same search options from the Find Tab are provided, as well as the additional replace options described below.
Replace with - Enter the text or regular expression for which to replace the item that is searched. You can retrieve previous replacement text or regular expressions by clicking the drop-down list button.
Click the right-pointing arrow button to the right of the Replace with field to display a menu containing tagged expressions. See Using Tagged Expressions for more information.
Preserve case - When specified, each occurrence found is checked for all lowercase, all uppercase, first word capitalized, or mixed case. The replace string is converted to the same case as the occurrence found except when the occurrence found is mixed case (possibly multiple capitalized words). In this case, the replace string is used without modification.
Highlight replaced text - Select this option to highlight all instances of the text that was replaced.
Replace button - Click to replace the first instance of the item.
Replace All button - Click to replace every instance of the item.
Preview All button - Click to show a side-by-side comparison of the original file and the file with replacements made. This lets you see the changes and confirm them before committing the changes to the file.
Tip
You can use the menu items Edit → Undo and Edit → Redo to undo/redo replacements.
This tab on the Find and Replace View provides the same functionality as the Replace Tab, with the added ability to conduct multi-file replacements. It contains one additional option, described below.
Leave modified files open - Select this option to open all of the files on which a replace has been performed.
The Results options are the same as those on the Find in Files Tab.
Tip
You can use the menu items Edit → Multi-File Undo and Edit → Multi-File Redo to undo/redo replacements in multiple files.
The Find Symbol view is used to locate symbols in your code. It allows you to search for symbols by name using either a regular expression, substring, or fast prefix match. The view is displayed when you click Search → Find Symbol or when you use the gui_push_tag command.
See Find Symbol View under the Symbol Browsing topic for more information.
Search for - Enter the name of the symbol to find. If you select the option Use pattern, you can enter regular expressions or wildcards in the search field. If you specify <Use Context Tagging®> for the Look in field, then you can enter language-specific expressions, such as "this->get" to find getters in your current class. SlickEdit® Core displays a progress bar at the top of this view while a search is in progress.
Incremental matches are displayed with each character you type, and the first element in the list is selected. Press Tab to put focus into the list of matches. Press Enter to navigate to the first match. Press Down to select the next match. Press Escape to stop the search.
Symbol List - The list of search results are refreshed as you type the search string. They include the symbol name, the file that contains it, and the line number. You can sort by any of the three columns.
The selected match is highlighted and is displayed in the Preview view. Single-click or use the arrow keys to select a match. Double-click or press Enter to navigate to that match.
Look in - Use this control to specify the scope of the symbol search. The options are:
<Use Context Tagging®> - This is the default setting. It uses Context Tagging to intelligently determine which tag files to search.
<Current File> - Select this setting to only search the tags in the current file, including local variables in the current function scope.
<Current Project> - Select this setting to only search in files that are in the current project.
<Current Workspace> - Select this setting to only search in files that are in the current workspace.
< Language Tag Files> - Select this setting to search all language-specific tag files for the indicated extension. This may also include your workspace tag file.
Specific tag files - Select one of the specific tag files listed to limit search to that file.
<All Tag Files> - Select this setting to search all tag files for all languages.
Search Options - The search options can be expanded or collapsed to save space.
Match case - When selected, SlickEdit Core uses a case-sensitive search to find symbol matches. When this option is not selected, SlickEdit Core uses a case-insensitive search. When this option is in the neutral (mixed) state, SlickEdit Core first searches for case-sensitive matches, and if none are found, attempts to perform a case-insensitive search. Note that for case-insensitive languages, this may have no effect.
Match substring (slower) - When selected, SlickEdit Core searches for the specified string within the available symbols. For example, finding all symbols containing the word "order," not just those that begin with "order." Selecting this option causes the search to execute more slowly.
Use pattern (slower) - When selected, SlickEdit Core interprets the search string as a regular expression or wildcard expression. This can result in slower search times, since SlickEdit Core must test every symbol in the tag file against the regular expression.
Filters - Use filters to restrict the search to certain types of symbols. The filters are the same the ones available on the Definitions view. See Outline View for more information.
Buttons - The following buttons are located at the bottom of the view:
Go to definition - Navigates to the definition of this symbol in the editor window. If the programming language allows for separate declaration and definition, you can control which is selected by using the language-specific Context Tagging® options screen (Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Languages → [Language Category] → [Language] → Context Tagging): Select either Go to Definition navigates to symbol definition (proc) or Go to Definition navigates to symbol declaration (proto). See Code Navigation for more information.
Go to reference - Displays a list of references for the selected symbol in the References View and, optionally, navigates to the first reference. Click Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Editing → Context Tagging and check the option Go to Reference only lists references if you just want to build the list of references. See Code Navigation for more information.
Show in symbol browser - Displays the selected symbol in the Symbols View. Note that this feature does not work for local variables or symbols from the current file that are not in a tag file.
Manage tag files - Displays the Context Tagging - Tag Files Dialog, which can be used to update your tag files.
The Bookmark Stack dialog can be used to view, navigate to, and delete Pushed Bookmarks. To display it, from the main menu, click Search → Bookmark Stack, or use the bookmark_stack command.
The first column in the Bookmark Stack dialog (labeled No.), indicates the numerical order of each bookmark in the stack, according to when the bookmark was pushed. New pushed bookmarks are always placed at the top of the stack, so you can pop them off one by one with Ctrl+Comma as you make your way back through the code. See Pushing and Popping Bookmarks for more information.
Popping bookmarks is the best way to navigate through your pushed bookmarks, deleting them in the process. However, you can also use the Bookmark Stack dialog to navigate to pushed bookmarks or delete a pushed bookmark:
To go to the line in your source code that contains a pushed bookmark, double-click on the bookmark in the dialog. Or, select the bookmark to jump to and press the Enter key or click OK. The Bookmark Stack dialog is dismissed after this operation. Prior to jumping to the bookmark, SlickEdit® Core automatically creates a new pushed bookmark at the current location and places it on top of the stack.
To delete a pushed bookmark, select it and press the Delete key or click Delete. The order of the stack is still maintained, indicated by the numbers in the No. column.
The Select Symbol dialog is automatically displayed when you use the Go to Definition feature (by pressing Ctrl+Dot, clicking Navigate → Go to Definition from the main menu, or using the push_tag command), when multiple code locations match the selected symbol. See Symbol Navigation for more information about this feature.
The dialog displays all tagged instances of the symbol in your project, including definitions and declarations. The name of the symbol and the file path and line number are shown.
To go to a symbol, select it and click OK or double-click on it. Like other selection dialogs, you can also start to type the name of the symbol and as you type, SlickEdit Core auto-selects the matched item in the list.
The options on this dialog set the behavior of Go to Definition going forward. The first three options match the Go to Definition options found at Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Languages → [Language Category] → [Language] → Context Tagging (see Language-Specific Context Tagging® Options). When you make a setting on the Select Symbol dialog, the settings on the Options dialog are updated to match, and this dialog does not appear again unless there is more than one unique definition or declaration.
When the option Do not show these options again is selected, the Select Symbol dialog does not show these options when/if it is displayed in the future. This option is automatically checked when you select one of the Prioritize navigation to... options.
To reset the default behavior so this dialog with options appears again when applicable, go to the language-specific Go to Definition options and uncheck both of the Prioritize navigation to... options.
The item selected in the Select Symbol dialog will be shown in the Preview view. If you wish to scroll the previewed text use the following keyboard shortcuts.
Ctrl+Down -- Scroll down one line.
Ctrl+Up -- Scroll up one line.
Ctrl+Page Down -- Scroll down one page.
Ctrl+Page Up -- Scroll down one page.