Replace Dialog

Find What:

Type the word you want to find in this box. This is the search string. The command searches for the string of letters or numbers that you type, so if you search for "in", you will find the middle two letters of "find", as well as the word "in".

As for the Find dialog, this box remembers what you have previously searched for, even when you have closed and reopened the dialog. Click on the arrow to the right to get a list of recent searches.

Replace with:

Type the characters you want to use as replacements in this box. You may put nothing in this box, in which case the replacement will simply delete the text you found. This is the 'replacement string'.

This box also remembers recent replacement strings, as long as they were actually used to replace something in the document. Click on the arrow to the right to get a list of recent replacements.

Match case

This checkbox determines whether the string you are looking for must have the same combination of capital and lower case letters as the search string. If this box is selected, then "In" will not match "in". If it is not selected, "in" matches "In", "IN", "in", and "iN".

Whole Word

This checkbox determines whether the string you are looking should only be found when it is a word by itself. If this box is selected, then "in" will not match "within". If it is not selected, "in" matches "in", "within", "therein", etc.

Reverse Find

This checkbox determines whether the string you are looking for should be searched for backwards in the document - that is, from the cursor toward the beginning of the document, rather than toward the end of the document. If this box is selected, then the search will go from the cursor to the beginning of the document. If this box is not selected, then the search will go from the cursor to the end of the document.

Find

Clicking on this button will find the next occurrence of the search string in the document. AbiWord starts searching from the insertion point, toward the beginning or end of the document depending on the setting of the Reverse Find option (see below). The search stops when the whole document has been searched once. It does not replace the currently selected instance of the search string.

Find and Replace

This button replaces the currently selected instance of the search string with the replacement string, and moves to the next occurrence of the search string following the inserted replacement string. (This ensures that the process does not get stuck if the replacement string includes the string you are replacing.) If you click this button before clicking Find Next, it simply finds the next occurrence of the search string.

Replace All

This button searches the whole document and replaces all occurrences of the search string with the replacement string. Be careful using this feature. For example, if you wanted to replace all instances of 'flat' with 'apartment', this button would convert the sentence 'He spoke flatly.' to 'He spoke apartmently.'

Help

This button opens the documentation for the Replace dialog.

Close

This button closes the dialog.