11: Find, Replace, Navigate - transcript
Liam: The QUILL Cast, episode eleven. I'm Liam. Today: finding things, changing things at scale, and the search tools that work across whole folders.
Jessica: I'm Jessica. The basics behave exactly as your hands expect: control F opens find, type, enter, and QUILL announces the result and your new position. F3 repeats the search forward, shift F3 backward. The announcement includes match counts, so you always know if you found the only one or one of forty.
Liam: Options you'd hope for, present and spoken: case sensitivity, whole word matching, wrap-around. And the not-found case is announced plainly, no silent failure, no wondering whether the search ran.
Jessica: Replace, control H, adds the second field and the four verbs: find next, replace this one, replace all, or skip. Replace all announces how many changes it made, and here's the episode ten payoff, that entire replace-all is one undo step. Forty replacements, one control Z. You can be bold.
Liam: Now the power tier: regular expressions. Deep breath, everyone who just tensed up. A regular expression is a search pattern with wildcards, that's all. Backslash D means any digit. Dot means any character. Plus means one or more of the last thing. So backslash D plus finds every run of digits, every number in your document.
Jessica: One real example to make it concrete: you have dates like March fifth comma two thousand twenty-four scattered everywhere and need to find them all. A pattern of letters, space, digits, comma, space, digits does it in one search. You don't need to master regex; you need to know it exists, and steal patterns from the internet like the rest of us do.
Liam: Search in Files widens the lens: point it at a folder, give it a query, and QUILL searches every document inside, results in an accessible list, name, line, and context per hit, enter to open at the exact spot. The which chapter did I mention the lighthouse in problem, and the where's that clause across forty contracts problem, one tool.
Jessica: And a special search sibling built for review: the extraction-quality tools you'll meet again in the formats episodes can hunt low-confidence regions in converted documents. Search isn't just for words; it's for suspicion.
Liam: Let's talk about the intra-document navigation that pairs with search. After a find, your cursor is at the match, and every episode-seven skill applies from there, paragraph moves, section jumps. Power users chain: find the term, jump to its section head, bookmark it, keep hunting. Search drops pins; navigation connects them.
Jessica: The Quick Nav connection: in Browse Mode, finding and moving blur together, skim by heading to the right region, then control F within it. The fastest editors constantly alternate structure-jumps and text-search, each halving the distance the other must cover.
Liam: One discipline habit worth adopting from technical writers: search before you assert. About to write we discussed this in chapter two? Search chapter two and confirm. QUILL makes verification so cheap that flying blind stops being worth it.
Jessica: Homework. One: search a long document for a common word and ride F3 through every hit, listening to the counts. Two: do a replace-all, then undo it with one keystroke, feel the safety. Three: try one regex, backslash D plus, and hear QUILL find every number you own. Four: run Search in Files across a folder of documents for a phrase you half-remember.
Liam: Next episode: spelling, grammar, and the word tools, the dictionary, the thesaurus, and the misspelling navigation that makes cleanup fast.
Jessica: I'm Jessica.
Liam: I'm Liam. Seek, and ye shall find, with a match count.