Development Environment

Incremental Search

With the incremental search feature, the cursor moves to the next or previous occurrence of the specified string in the Command Window. It is similar to the Emacs search feature.

1. Position the cursor where you want the search to begin.
2. How you begin the incremental search depends on your setting for the Command line key bindings preference:
• Press Ctrl+S for Emacs, or
• Press Ctrl+Shift+S for Windows.

1. An incremental search field (I-search:) appears at the bottom of the Command Window.
   
   

3. In the I-search field, type the string you want to find. For example, type ode.

1. As you type the first letter, o, the first occurrence of that letter in the Command Window after the current cursor position is highlighted. In the example shown, the first occurrence of o is highlighted, the o in To in the startup message. Note that incremental search allows for case sensitivity--see Case Sensitivity in Incremental Search.

   

   When you type the next letter, the first occurrence of the string becomes highlighted. In the example, when you add the letter d to the o so that the I-search field now has od, the od in ode becomes highlighted.

   • If you mistype in the I-search field, use the Back Space key to remove the last letters and make corrections. Note that Back Space will first take you to any previous matches you just found using incremental search and will then remove the last letter in the I-search field.
   • After finding the o, you can press Ctrl+W and the rest of the word that is found, in this case ode23, appears in the I-search field.

4. To find the next occurrence of ode in the Command Window, press Ctrl+S. To find the previous occurrence of the string, press Ctrl+R.
5. If you hear a beep, it either means that the string was not found, or it means you are at the end or beginning of the Command Window.

1. Press Ctrl+S or Ctrl+R again to wrap to the beginning or end of the file and continue the search. Either the next occurrence of the string will be highlighted, or you will hear another beep indicating the string is not in the Command Window.

6. To end the incremental search, press Esc or Enter, or any other non-character or number key.

1. The I-search: field no longer appears in the window. The cursor is now located at the position where the string was last found, with the search string highlighted.

You can type Ctrl+R or Ctrl+Shift+R to display the I-search field to begin finding the previous occurrence rather than the next occurrence.

If you enter Ctrl+S or Ctrl+R after displaying the blank I-search field, the search term from your previous incremental search appears in the field. When you then use the Back Space key, you delete the entire previous search term, rather than just the last letter.

Searching in the Command Window

Case Sensitivity in Incremental Search