Search / replace selected text only?

[zambetti]

I suspect Zed does not support search/replace in 'selected text only', since when you click the magnifying glass while text is selected, it assumes that you are searching for that text.

This assumption might speed up some scenarios, however this makes it impossible to support a very useful variant of search/replace, one that is constrained to the selected text. Many editors offer this, notably the venerable BBEdit.

So it seems as it is now, Zed can only perform search/replace on an entire document, and there is no way to constrain search/replace to only the selected text. Can someone confirm this?

[mrnugget]

Yup, that's the current state.

[zambetti]

Thank you for the quick answer, it is good to know that this is not supported.

A workaround in the meantime is to cut/paste my selection into a new buffer, search/replace all, then cut/paste it back where it was in the original buffer. Not ideal, but it works in a pinch.

Do you feel that selection-constrained search/replace is worthwhile proposing as a feature/improvement?
If so, would you suggest that I create a 'Feature Request' issue?

[mrnugget]

Yeah, we can create a ticket for that.

FWIW I do think that multi-cursors go a long way here already. It requires kind of a mindset shift, but I'm starting to see it more and more.

[zambetti]

Thank you for this suggestion, I wasn't aware that multi-cursor could be used in this way via cmd-d. This will work well for simpler scenarios where I would have used selection-constrained search/replace in the past.

Another common situation where I use selection-constrained search/replace, is for re-ordering parameters (or other separated text) via regex match groups and numbered backreferences, but this does not seem to be supported by Zed's search/replace when Regex is enabled.

Support for numbered backreferences in Regex replacement is a different topic than selection-constrained search/replace, but I believe that there would be no other way to do this kind of edit in a non-document-wide fashion otherwise.

For example...

Results in...

Instead of...

*** Update ***

I see there are already issues #8315 and #7999 on the topic of support for numbered backreferences in Regex replacement.

I've opened a feature request issue #8617

[ethanmsl]

This is something in Helix does so well it sometimes think about going back just for it.

Especially with exploratory code it's very common that I just want to highlight a section, type some regex pattern (selecting that code), and then operate on all the highlighted code.

It's super common when doing exploration with debug elements, for example.
"Multi-cursor" is only useful if you can get the cursor where you want it. If text isn't nicely aligned it's time consuming.
Much nicer to just highlight and then enter a pattern to determine where cursors are.