W ITHOUT U SING A R EGULAR E XPRESSION
ture of TextMate is Forward Incremental Search. Mac users are probably more familiar with the term live search from applications such as iTunes, and in truth I think of this feature as a visual quick scan.
Scanning Let’s jump right into an example of how to use this. TextMate comes with complete release notes describing what is new and what has changed in each version of the editor. Suppose you wanted to read about the new features: 1. Select Help Release Notes. This opens the list in a regular TextMate editing window. 2. Click C S, and watch what happens to the bottom of the editing window when you do. The control bar that usually holds line and column counts along with language, automation, tab, and symbol menus will be replaced with a text-entry field. 3. Enter [ new] in the exposed field. As soon as you begin to type, TextMate will start a selection. When you have entered the first character, the first bracket of the document will be selected. When you add the second character, TextMate will move the selection forward to select the first occurrence of the pair. Note that this scan is not case-sensitive, although scans will be when you mix case in the search string. 4. Press C S a few more times to skip ahead in the document to subsequent matches. 5. Press C B S to go backward in a document to a previous match. 6. When you are finished experimenting, press F or K to once again hide the scanning field. See Figure 4.1, on the next page, for an example of how this plays out. As you can see, this is helpful for quickly scanning through document content.
The Find Dialog Box You can summon TextMate’s find-and-replace dialog box by selecting Edit Find Find or by pressing D F. This dialog box works similarly to the one in many other Mac applications when the Regular Expression box is not checked.
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