Find and Replace Text

In short Find and replace changes every occurrence of one string to another across a whole document at once, with case sensitivity, whole-word matching and full regular expression support. The whole-word option is the one that prevents the classic disaster: replacing "cat" with "dog" without it turns "category" into "dogegory" and "concatenate" into "condogenate", and the damage is scattered through the document where you will not see it. Turn it on unless you specifically mean to match inside words. The regular expression mode uses the JavaScript flavour, so it supports groups, character classes, lookahead and backreferences — writing $1 in the replacement inserts what the first group captured, which is how you reorder rather than merely substitute. Swapping "Surname, Firstname" to "Firstname Surname" across a list is one expression. Two practical habits: test on a few lines before running on the whole document, and keep the original, because replace has no undo once the text has left the box. A replacement that matches nothing is worth noticing rather than ignoring — it usually means the pattern is wrong.