Text Search#

Cmd + F (Edit ▸ Find ▸ 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.

Cmd + G and Shift + Cmd + G work whether or not the search bar is open. Closing the bar discards the highlighting, so the first Cmd + G afterwards re-runs the last query and lands on the first match at or after the page you are on.

Cmd + E takes the text you have selected in the page, makes it the query, and searches immediately. It also writes the term to the system find pasteboard, which is how macOS shares a search term between applications: switch to your editor and its own Cmd + G looks for the same string.

Jumping to a match is recorded in the navigation history, so Cmd + [ takes you back to where you were reading.

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.

Case sensitivity#

Search is case-insensitive by default. Tick Match Case in the search bar to require an exact match — the equivalent of turning off Vim’s ignorecase. The setting applies to plain and regular-expression searches alike.

Regular expressions#

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

\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.