Find and Replace

This page covers the Quick Find widget — the GUI surface of MathJet’s find-and-replace machinery.

Note

The behavior of Find and Replace on charts — value-criterion selection, dynamic-cell highlighting in worksheets, synchronized search with the Graph Companion — is documented in detail under Interactive Visualization → Find and replace. This page is the GUI-widget reference; the visualization page is the operation reference. They cover the same feature from different angles.

The Quick Find widget

The Quick Find widget is a unified find-and-replace surface that works across charts, worksheets, and code editors — the same widget, behaving correctly for whatever document type has focus.

Activate it via:

• Edit → Find for find-only mode (Ctrl+F).
• Edit → Replace for find-and-replace mode (Ctrl+H).

Find behavior

Once you enter keywords:

• All matching items are highlighted in the active document.
• Navigate with Find Prev and Find Next buttons.
• Standard search options — case sensitivity, whole-word matching, regular expressions — are available in the widget.

The display of the active document updates dynamically as you type in the search box. When the Find Results window is open and you press Return in the Search box, each search is logged in the Find Results window — clicking a result highlights it in the document.

Per-document type behavior

• Worksheets — matched cells stand out with an orange background by default. Enable Dynamic Cell Highlight to grey out the unmatched cells for additional contrast.
• Charts and plots — matched data points are selected and highlighted by default. There’s an option to hide unmatched points for cleaner visibility, working for both 2D and 3D graphs. (Search affects only the display, not the underlying data.)
• Code editors — matched text is highlighted; structure-aware navigation is available where the parser supports it (Python and R).

Replace behavior

Replace mode supports text-literal replacement everywhere, plus three advanced modes available in worksheets and charts:

• Replace with a literal string or value.
• Adjust — for numerical data: e.g., search criterion 10:12 with replacement value 5 and Replace All increases every cell in the original 10–12 range by 5.
• Scale — multiply matched values by a factor.
• Custom — enter an expression that’s interpreted by the active command interpreter. Built-in variables like t (matched string) and x, y (graph data point coordinates) are available, plus any function the language supports. The expression is evaluated for each match.

See also

• Visualization → Find and replace for the operation-level reference.
• Graph Companion — the search box at the top of the Graph Companion and the Quick Find widget can run synchronized searches across the chart and its data table.