Text Search#

Cmd + F (Edit ▸ Find…) opens a search bar across the top of the window. Cmd + F again, or Esc, closes it.

The chevron buttons beside the field do the same as Enter and Shift + Enter. A counter to their left shows which match you are on; it reads Not found when there is nothing to jump to.

Matches that span a line break#

Searching runs against the page text with line breaks folded away, so a phrase that a paragraph happens to wrap in the middle still matches. Looking for Theorem 1 finds it even when the PDF broke the line between the two words. This is what you want when searching typeset output, where line breaks are an artefact of layout rather than anything you wrote.

Regular expressions#

Tick Regex in the search bar to treat the query as a regular expression. The syntax is NSRegularExpression — that is, ICU — and matching is case-insensitive.

\d+\.\d+          section numbers such as 2.3
Fig(ure)? \d+     both "Fig 4" and "Figure 4"
^\s*Abstract      Abstract at the start of a line

A pattern that does not compile shows Invalid regex in place of the match counter, and the search is left alone until you fix it.