Search

Press / to open a search prompt over the status line. Type a query, press Enter to run it. n / p cycle forward / backward through matches (wrapping at the ends), scrolling each into view. The status line shows cur/total while a search is active, or no match when nothing hits.

Literal and regex

Matching defaults to exact substring. Ctrl-R inside the prompt toggles regex — a linear-time engine with no catastrophic backtracking; the prompt title shows the active mode (Search (literal) / Search (regex)). A malformed regex flashes the parse reason and leaves the previous search untouched. While a regex search is active the count is prefixed with regex.

Regex matches per logical line, so ^ / $ anchor to line bounds and a pattern can't span a line break.

Smart case

Both modes honour smart-case: an all-lowercase query matches case-insensitively; any uppercase character makes the whole query case-sensitive.

Match highlight

A match gets an explicit background and foreground pair — the syntax colour underneath is dropped so matched text looks uniform regardless of what it was, then resumes after the span. Both colours derive from the theme's accent hue: the current n / p match is vivid, the rest muted.

Where it works

Search reaches every text-rendering view — source / plain text / structured raw-pretty / SVG XML, the rendered HTML view, the EPUB Read view, the DOCX / ODT / RTF Read views, the PDF Text view, the CSV / TSV Table view and the SQLite contents view that shares it, and every listing TOC. Two scopes differ from a plain text scan:

• Table views (CSV / TSV / SQLite) search per cell — a query can't span a delimiter.
• Listing TOCs (archives, ISO, directories, PDF embeds, …) match the last path segment only, so sub/ finds nothing.

Clearing and limits

An empty-query Enter clears the search; so does Esc while a search is active (it clears matches first, then falls through to normal back / quit on a second press). Search also clears when the scanned line set changes underneath it — the raw/pretty toggle, an EPUB chapter step, or a terminal resize.

The scan is a single pass over the active view, capped at 100,000 matches. The raw text scan and the table-cell scan are additionally budgeted at 256 MB per query — past it the counts show as partial (12/3400+) and a warning surfaces.

Planned: incremental search-as-you-type, reach into the file-info and hex views, and a lazy / bounded "search from here" pass for multi-GB files. See the project's docs/planned.md.