Searching and Replacing Text

When you are writing programs or documents, you may often want to search for a given text in your document. Emacs has several functions for searching for text. This section describes these functions.

Another task that you often find yourself doing is replacing some text with another. There are three kinds of searches:

  • Ordinary searches— In this kind of search, you type the text that you want to search for; Emacs will go to the first occurrence of this text. You can then ask it to go to the second occurrence, the third, and so on.

  • Incremental searches— In this kind of search, Emacs starts the search as soon as you type the first letter. As you type more letters, Emacs searches further on in your document, to reflect ...

Get Practical UNIX now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.