Search and replacement

Find text in a file

Press /, type a regular expression, and press Enter. Use n and N to select the next and previous matches. ? starts a backward search.

To search for selected text, press *, then n. Mitos treats the text literally and adds word boundaries where appropriate. Use Alt-* to search without adding word boundaries.

Search ignores case unless the pattern contains an uppercase letter. It wraps at the end of a file by default. Change either behavior in editor.search.

Replace several matches

1. Press % to select the whole file, or select the region you want to edit.
2. Press s, type the regular expression, and press Enter.
3. Press Alt-r, type the replacement, and press Enter.

Each match becomes a separate selection. The replacement applies to all of them in one undo step. Esc cancels the replacement; an empty replacement deletes the selected text. Replacement text is literal: $1 does not expand a regex capture. The new text stays selected. Press , to keep one selection, or . to repeat the replacement on other selections.

Use c instead of Alt-r to edit the matches interactively in insert mode. The r command replaces every selected character with one character: selecting hello and pressing rx gives xxxxx; replacing it with Alt-r and x gives x.

For an edit across several lines, Alt-s first creates one selection per line. K keeps selections matching a regex; Alt-K removes matching selections. See Selections for more examples.

Search a project

Press Space / to open global search and enter a regular expression. Press Enter to open a result. Use Space ' to return to the results.

Filter paths by adding %path (or %p) to the query. For example, TODO %p .rs searches for TODO in matching Rust file paths. Path filters use fuzzy matching; see picker filters.

To search for the current selection, press *, then Space /, then Enter without entering another query. Global search follows the file-picker ignore settings.

Press Ctrl-q in the results to collect their locations in the quicklist. After closing the picker, use ]q and [q to visit each result and edit it. The selection replacement workflow above operates within the current buffer.