Searching Within a File

Tap the Search button (“loupe” icon) to open the find and replace screen.

Tap Find or Replace to switch between find and replace modes.

After entering text to search for in the find text field, Textastic will immediately display a list of search results highlighted in yellow and will also highlighted the text in the code editor.

Tap a search result to scroll to and highlight the place where the search term was found.

Search Settings

Tap the Settings button (“gear” icon) to change search settings:

Text

Search for a simple text string. You can also search for “\n” or “\r” to find newline characters and “\t” to find tab characters. Enter “\\” to search for a backslash.

Regular Expression

Enable regular expression search. Textastic uses the ICU regular expression syntax and supports TextMate’s replacement string syntax including capture references, case foldings and conditional insertions.

Use $n to reference a capture in the replace string, where n is the capture register number. Using $0 means the entire match.

Case Sensitive

By default, search is case-insensitive. Enable this setting to make search case sensitive and only find instances with matching case.

Diacritic Sensitive

By default, search ignores diacritic marks: for example, ‘ö’ is equal to ‘o’ and ‘é’ is equal to ‘e’. Enable this setting to only find letters with matching diacritic marks.

Note

This setting is not shown when using regular expression search. Regular expression search is always diacritic sensitive.

Whole Words

If you enable this setting, the search will only find whole words. For example, a search for “word” will find “word” but not “wording” or “password”.

Replace

Tap the Replace button in a search result to replace that search result using the value entered in the replace text field.

Tap the Replace All button to replace all search results.

See Search Settings for details about the supported replace string syntax when using regular expression search.