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.

Buffer search matches use the theme’s ui.cursor.match style. The active selection keeps its selection style. Highlights remain after confirming a search and clear when the document changes. Canceling restores the previous highlights; empty or invalid input clears the preview. Confirming an empty prompt repeats the previous search.

Highlighting covers complete visible source lines, including horizontally scrolled text. Multiline matches crossing the viewport boundary or a fold may be omitted. Workspace search and replacement previews retain their existing result-line highlighting.

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.

To replace across files directly, press Alt-r in global search and enter a replacement. Enter replaces one match; Ctrl-Enter replaces all occurrences in the files matching the current path filter. Global replacement expands regex captures. Existing buffers stay unsaved; unopened files are updated directly on disk. See Replacing global search results.