Search Tool
The Search tool in the Tools menu can be used to search and replace within the current editor.
Searches may be initiated from the Search and Replace sub-menu of the Edit menu, using Search, Replace, Search for Selection Forward, and Search for Selection Backward. The Replace field will be hidden unless a replace operation was started. It can also be shown from the Options menu at the top right of the tool.
The popups to the right of the Search and Replace fields, contain a history of previously used strings. Right-click on the fields to insert special characters.
To search only part of a file, select the desired range in the editor and check In Selection.
When a match is visited in the editor, Wing highlights it briefly with a callout, as configured from the Editor > Callouts preferences group.
Search Type
The type of search is selected from the Options menu:
Text Search chooses plain text search, without wildcard or regex matching.
Wildcard Search uses wildcard style searching. See Wildcard Search Syntax for details.
Regex Search uses regular expression style searching. See Python's Regular Expression Syntax documentation for details. When Regex Search is selected, a popup menu Regex Flags appears to the left of the Options menu. These are the same flags passed to Python's re.compile(). For regex searching, the replace string can reference regex match groups with \1, \2, etc, as in the Python re.sub() call.
For each of these, the checkboxes in the tool provide some additional options:
Case Sensitive shows only exact matches of upper and lower case letters in the search string.
Whole Words requires that matches are surrounded by white space (spaces, tabs, or line ends) or punctuation other than _ (underscores).
Search Options
The following additional options are available from the Options menu:
Show Replace controls whether the Replace field is visible in the tool.
Wrap Search allows wrapping when the search reaches the top or bottom of a file.
Incremental immediately starts or restarts searching as you type or alter search options. When unchecked, use the Previous and Next search buttons to initiate searching.
Find After Replace automatically finds the next search match after each replace operation.
Special Characters
The right-click context menu on the Search and Replace fields provide some options for search and replace strings to include special characters:
Insert Newline inserts new line (\r\n on Windows and \n on other OSes)
Insert Line Feed inserts a line feed character (\n)
Insert Carriage Return inserts a carriage return character (\r)
Insert Tab inserts a tab character (\t)
Interpret Backslash Characters toggles whether special characters like \n, \r, \t and others are interpreted as a backslash followed by a letter or as the character that they represent (line feed, carriage return, tab, etc). The supported characters are all those that Python supports in its representation of strings.
