Finding and replacing text
You can easily locate and change a word (or any set of characters) that you have 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.
- Choose Edit > Find > "Find..." and type the text you want to search for.
- If you want to replace the text with something else, type the new text in the "Replace with" box.
- 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 current 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.
To search for text without consideration for capital and lowercase letters, select Ignore Case.
To search for text contained inside words, choose Contains from the pop-up menu (for example, if you type "most", TextEdit will find "almost"). To search for letters at the beginning of words, select "Starts with." To search only for the complete word you typed in the Find field, select "Full word."
You can also search for text styled in a certain way (for example, all underlined words in Lucida Grande font). Choose Other from the Styles pop-up menu to open the Styles dialog.