Script Debugger provides excellent find (and replace) facilities.

You can operate from within the Find dialog (which appears when you choose Search > Find), or you can use the menu items in the Search menu (or their keyboard shortcuts). Most likely you’ll settle on a combination of the Find dialog and a few commonly used keyboard shortcuts.

Checkbox options in the Find dialog affect subsequent searching even if the Find dialog is no longer showing. Thus, a common way to find is to choose Search > Find to bring up the Find dialog, enter the text to look for, set options, and press Return to click the Find button, and then use Search > Find Again to look for subsequent instances.

If you can see text, you can search for that text without bringing up the Find dialog at all. Using the Search menu items, you can enter selected text into the Search For field or the Replace With field, or you can use Search > Find Selection to enter selected text to the Search For field and find it, in a single move.

Checkbox options, as well as buttons, in the Find dialog are generally self-explanatory. Here are comments on less obvious features:

• To search backwards as you press one of the three Replace buttons, hold down the Shift key.

• The Wrap Around setting applies even to Replace All. If Wrap Around is unchecked and you do a Replace All, only instances of the Search For text after the insertion point will be affected.

• If Auto-Close Find Window is checked, then if you click the Next, Previous, First, or Last button and the search succeeds, the Find window will close.

• The little pop-down arrows to the right of the text fields summon history lists of Search For and Replace With terms that you’ve used earlier. Click a term to enter it conveniently into the text field.

• Script Debugger supports optional use of regular expressions in the text fields of the Find dialog. If you don’t know about regular expressions, the best teacher is still Jeffrey Friedl’s book. Script Debugger uses the ICU flavor of regular expression syntax.

Experts: Observe that by default . matches any character including the return character at the end of a line; you can turn this off with (?-s).

An Editor preference lets you set whether the Search For field contents are shared with other applications.