You can find and replace text in a document by choosing Edit ‣ Find ‣ Find… ⌘F.

Select all occurrences

You may want to select text repeated many times in a document and format it differently. For example, you might want to highlight each speaker’s name with a different color or uppercase a particular word every time it is mentioned. To do this, turn on the “Replace” checkbox, click and hold the “All” button, then choose “Select All” from the menu that appears. Now you can edit all selections once instead of performing multiple finds and edits. For macOS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” users: You can accomplish this by holding down the Control key in the Find window to make “Replace All” change to “Select All”.

Replace in selection

It can be useful to find and replace all terms within a particular text selection instead of the whole document. To do this, turn on the “Replace” checkbox, click and hold the “All” button, then choose “Replace All In Selection” from the menu that appears. All text found within the selection is replaced with the replace text. For macOS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” users: You can accomplish this by holding the Option key in the Find window to make “Replace All” change to “In Selection”.

Using returns and tabs

Sometimes you may need to find or replace a return or tab. You can enter a return or tab by holding the Option key while pressing the Return or Tab keys. This avoids triggering the window shortcut to find the next term or change the focus to another control.

If you need to find or replace other special characters but are unsure how to type them, you can copy and paste them into the find or replace fields.