Find & Replace

Find text (and Replace it if needed) quickly

Our built-in Find and Replace module has all the features you would expect from a word processor, plus a few script-specific extras.

To bring up the Find & Replace box

Either select the Find/Replace... item in the Edit menu, or depress the Ctrl-F key combination on your keyboard. On doing either, you will see the Find/Replace box pop up:

Note that you can drag the popup box around the screen by clicking in the title area and dragging it.

To find some text in the script, just enter it in the Find What box and depress the Enter key. To the right of the Find What box you will see the total number of matches, as well as the current match highlighted in the script with a light pink background:

Note that all the matches throughout the script will get highlighted (in light green) with the current match shown in light red:

One extra worth remembering: If you first select a word (or even a short phrase) in the screenplay, then bring up the Find/Replace box, we automatically enter the selected text in the Find What box and perform an immediate search for you.

Next/Previous/Whole Word

To ensure we only match complete words, click the ab button to the right of the Find What box to toggle Whole Word finding. The button will have a light orange background when on or a white background when off:

Also, to jump to either the next or the previous match in the script, click on the up and down arrow icons that are located at the right edge of the popup box:

Want to Search only in certain types of Paragraphs?

Search in Action, Dialogue, or any combination of paragraph types as needed. To specify what to search, use the dropdown menu at the bottom of the popup box to select Element types you want to be searched:

Note: To once again search in all types of paragraphs, just be sure all the check boxes for the Element types are turned off.

A note about Upper/Lower case

Currently, our Find is case insensitive, so "maria" will match all occurrences (MARIA, Maria, etc), regardless of whether the target word is upper, lower or mixed case. We do this because while we force elements such as Scene Headings and Character Names to get shown in upper case, the underlying text might not really be saved that way in the script.

Replacing Text

Detailed explanation to come...