Need to replace a word with another word, or quickly remove bits of text from a document? Just use search-and-replace — whatever application or browser you’re using, you already have an easy find-and-replace tool available to you.
To use any of the commands that you turned on, first make your Mac listen for dictation commands: Press the keyboard shortcut for starting dictation. The default shortcut is Fn Fn (press the Fn key twice). Or turn on the option “Enable the dictation keyword phrase,” which is next to the Dictation Commands button.
Copy-paste the text into one of the below applications and then copy-paste it into your original application later. You can usually step through the replacements one-by-one or click a “Replace All” button.
Windows
The Notepad application included with Windows doesn’t offer this feature, but WordPad does. To open WordPad, tap the Start button to open the Start menu or Start screen, type WordPad, and press Enter.
Copy-paste the text you want to modify into WordPad. Click the Replace button in the Editing section on the ribbon — it’s under the Home tab. Type the text you want to replace into the “Find what” box, type the text you want to replace it with in the “Replace With” box, and then click the “Replace All” button to replace all of it. You can remove text by entering it in the “Find what” box and then leaving the “Replace With” box empty.
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office has its own built-in search-and-replace functions, as do alternative office suites like LibreOffice and Apple’s Pages application. You’ll generally just find this option under the Edit menu in any office suite or powerful text-editing application you’re using.
In Microsoft Word, click over to the HOME tab on the ribbon and click Replace in the Editing section. You can click the More button to access a variety of options, including wildcards.
To use wildcards, use the * character — it can match all different characters, and any number of them. For example, let’s say you entered “h*k” into the Find what box. This would match “heck,” “hack,” and “how-to geek” — any string of text beginning with an “h” and ending with a “k.”
Google Docs
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You can also do this in Google Docs. If you’re not yet using Google Docs, go to the Google Drive website and create a new document. Copy-paste your text into the new document, if you need to, and use the Edit > Find and Replace menu option to perform a search-and-replace.
This is a good solution for searching-and-replacing text on a Chromebook, too. You won’t have typical desktop text editors, but you will have Google Docs.
Mac OS X
The TextEdit text editor included with Mac OS X includes this feature. To use it, open the TextEdit application and copy-paste the text you want to modify into it. Click Edit > Find > Find and Replace. After entering the text you want to find and replace, click the “All” button to replace all instances of it in the document.
You can also click and hold down on the All button to access additional options — for example, you could select a section of the text document with your cursor and run the search-and-replace operation only on that selected text.
Linux
Linux text editors will have this powerful feature, too. Whatever text editor your desktop environment includes, you’ll probably just need to open it, click a menu like “Edit” or “Replace,” and select a “Find and Replace” or “Search and Replace” option.
For example. in the Gedit text editor included with Ubuntu’s Unity, Linux Mint’s MATE and Cinnamon, and other GNOME-based desktops, you just need to click the Search menu and select Replace to get started.
Sure, you can probably just perform a web search for “search and replace text” and you’ll find a dedicated website with a few easy ones you can use. But you don’t necessarily want to paste potentially sensitive text into a random website. Just use whatever tool already comes on your computer.
For more advanced operations, some tools may allow you to search-and-replace with regular expressions.
Image Credit: Andrew Mason on Flickr
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Click to viewThat Mac you're viewing this web page on using a pretty graphical interface? That's a Unix-based system which can run the powerful and age old command line utilities of the most advanced Unix beard. If you've never launched the Terminal, you're missing out on a plethora of Unix tools that offer more control and options than any dialog box possibly could. We've covered some basic Unix command line techniques in the past, but today we've got a few more for folks who want to start their Unix ninja training from the comfort of their own Mac. Replace Terminal with iTerm
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The first stop in your foray into Mac OS X command line goodness is getting yourself a proper terminal. While all the commands we'll discuss will work just fine in the built-in Terminal.app (located in /Applications/Utilities), the free, open source iTerm is a definite improvement over vanilla Terminal. Mostly because it supports tabbed sessions, which lets you run several tasks in various tabs without taking up screen real estate. Download iTerm here (free). iTerm tab hint: once you've got more than one tab open, use the Ctrl+Right/Left arrow to move between them.
The Basics
We've already posted a series of beginner's guides to the command line for Windows users running the Unix emulator Cygwin. This is the beauty and advantage of being comfortable at the Unix command line: learn commands once and they'll work most anywhere—on Mac, in Windows/Cygwin, and in most flavors of any Unix-based system. So instead of traversing ground we've already covered, hit up our past tutorials instead (and ignore all the Cygwin-specific stuff):
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While almost the entire recipe box of established Unix commands work on OS X, there are also a few Mac-specific command line tools that hook into Spotlight, access your iPod and other external disks, launch Mac graphical applications and install more open source applications. Let's take a look. Launch Applications and Documents
The
open command can open up a certain file in its associated application (like open lifehacker.doc will launch Word with lifehacker.doc open) or it can launch a specific application. To open a document, you've got to be in the directory where that document lives; to launch an application, use the -a option to tell Mac OS X to look in the Applications folder. For example, open -a ichat will launch iChat no matter what directory you're in. Using previously-mentioned aliases, you could map the command ichat='open -a ichat' in your .bash_profile to save yourself some keystrokes, too.
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Access Files on Your iPod (and Other External Volumes)
Now that you know how to navigate folders and subfolders and file listings, you may want to use your new command line knowledge to check out external disks connected to your Mac, like your iPod. Mac OS X lists all external drives in the /Volumes/ directory. So to get there, type
cd /Volumes/ and hit Enter. Then a quick ls will list the available drives. Here I've got an iPod (with disk use enabled in iTunes) called 'Terra's iPod' connected to the Mac. Move into it using cd Terra's iPod (you can use the Tab key after T to autocomplete the volume name, which is a little screwy because of the apostrophe) and then ls the directories there. Your iPod's music is stored in the /iPod_Control/Music directory, so you can cd there to see how all your music shows up:
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Sadly your music is stored in folders with non-obvious names, like F00-F49. cd into any one of those directories and you'll see similarly-named music files. To copy those files back to your Mac's internal hard drive, a simple cp command would get the job done.
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Access, Search and List Spotlight File Metadata
Mac OS X's built-in file search system Spotlight indexes a lot more than just file names and contents. It builds an index of metadata like file type, author, times and dates and other information, like artist and album for properly tagged music files and camera model information for digital photos. https://treeboost708.weebly.com/word-for-mac-text-before-text-box.html. Using the
mdls command, you can list Spotlight's metadata for a file and using mdfind , search for files that only match certain criteria. For example, to see the metadata for a Word document, I'd do an mdls filename.doc , as shown:
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To see other documents authored by Marcia, I'd use the
mdsfind command with the filtering parameter 'kMDItemAuthors 'Marcia Ellett' :
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Install Open Source Software with Fink
The Fink Project ports open source Unix software to run on Mac OS X's Darwin and makes that software available for download to your Mac in a simple command. Once you download and install Fink, you can use the
sudo apt-get install emacs , for instance, to install the classic Emacs editor. Or you can browse the list of available packages in Fink using the free Fink Commander graphical interface, which looks like this:
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Open Command Prompt In MacMore Fun Stuff
Other Unix fun to be had on your Mac (or any *nix system) includes:
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Further Reading
For more on Unix for Mac users, check out Dave Taylor's excellent book, Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, which inspired and informed this article.
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Search Text Command Mac$10Mac Command Line Find File
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How do you use the Unix goodness baked into your Mac? Let us know in the comments.
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Search For Text Command Mac Keyboard
Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, loves herself some Terminal activity. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
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