Use the "Search Disk" command (Ctrl+D) to do a Search/replace operation on your disk files instead of the documents in NoteTab. The advantage of this tool is that you do not need to open all the files you want to process – you save both time and system resources.
The dialog box has two tabs that let you choose whether you want to do a search or a replace operation. Note that the "Replace in Files" tab is not available in the Freeware version of NoteTab Std (unless the "View | Commercial Features" menu command has been activated).
The Find and Replace fields accept tokens to represent special characters. These are:
^T = Tab ($09)
^B = Page break ($0C)
^P = Paragraph (carriage-return/line-feed pair)
^C = Carriage-return ($0D)
^L = Line-feed ($0A)
If you actually need to search characters that correspond to one of the tokens, just precede it with an extra ^ symbol (for example ^^T to search for ^T). Note that you can set the font of the Find/Replace fields: right click on one of the fields to open the shortcut menu with the Font command.
Note that these tokens are not applicable when you perform regular expression searches.
Use the File Masks field to specify the directory that contains the files you want to search. Use standard wildcards for the file name to limit the search to matching files; you can specify multiple file criteria by separating them with a semi-colon ";" (e.g. C:\NoteTab\*.txt;*.otl;*.htm*). Put a checkmark in the "Include Subdirectories" field if you want to expand the search to all the subdirectories. By default, the procedure will not search through hidden files unless you put a checkmark in the "Hidden Files" box.
Put a checkmark in the "Find First" field if you want the search operation to stop as soon as a match has been encountered. This option is only available if you are doing a "Find in Files" operation.
Put a checkmark in the "Backup" field if you want backup copies of files modified by the replace operation.
When you enable the Confirm option, matching files are displayed in a list box. You can then select which files you want to open in NoteTab when you are doing a find operation. If you are doing a replace operation, you can select which files should be processed; you can also open the selected files in NoteTab if you prefer. If the replace operation encounters binary files, it will display them in the list box even if you haven't set the confirm option.
Put a checkmark in the Reg. Expr. checkbox if you want to define the search criteria as a regular expression. Caution: The regular expression tokens that refer to line breaks expect these to correspond to the Windows text-file format (i.e. carriage-return/line-feed pair). These tokens will not work correctly when you search through UNIX and Mac file.
You can increase the size of the dialog box if necessary and save the new size by opening its Control (or System) menu and clicking on Save Window State.
Note that read-only files are ignored when the Replace operation is chosen.